By David Ponce
Not much by way of tangible, useable information at this point, but it seems that company Jiristech is getting ever closer to releasing the JCP1000. It’s a webcam with biometric abilities. In other words, soon as you sit in front of a locked computer and place your face within the 15-20cm working range, it’ll scan your irises in one second flat, and give access to authorised persons only.
Aving reported on this sometime in March, but since then, photos have surfaced that make it looks a hell of a lot more like a real product. Of course, I don’t know that this adds anything that a fingerprint scanner can’t already do, but there’s something Hollywood about it all, no?
[Jiristech] VIA [Gizmologia]
Also, more pictures at [Aving]
Iris scanning DOES add one major thing to the mix that fingerprint scanning doesn’t. Iris scanners cannot be faked by use of a gummy bear. If someone uses a fingerprint scanner, someone later can get the print with a gummy bear and use it to scan in successfully.
Iris scanners can sometimes be fooled by a picture of the eye, depending on the technology. Also… if you really, really want to break one of these things, there’s a possibility that the protocol from the reader to the laptop is insecure. So… make sure that no one’s using a “usb sniffer” when you enroll your iris-print. Also, someone might want to do a 3rd party review to ensure that the protocol isn’t so simple that the iris print is stored in the camera and the camera sends a “yup, that’s the right eyeball” message when it sees an enrolled iris. Breaking something like that would be relatively trivial.
Also… insert all the standard disclaimers about biometrics. Somewhere in the system is a copy of your biometric, please make sure it’s secure. If the biometric is on the laptop’s hard drive, and I steal your hard drive, I can probably dig around until I figure out how to reverse engineer the scanner’s control software to get it to think that a teddy bear is the key.
Admittedly, I’m probably not going to do this if the only thing on the protected laptop is your mother’s gespacho recipe. But I hope you’re not using this to protect the nuclear launch codes. That would be bad.
Do we even need a ‘special biometric camera’? Cant it be only software dependant?