Review: DigitalPersona U.are.U Personal fingerprint scanner. Biometric authentication seems to be, on the face of it, a groovy idea.
Do away with hard-to-remember passwords and easy-to-lose keys and cards; authenticate your identity with your voice, or your face, or your fingerprint. What could possibly be wrong with that? Well, lots of things, actually. High on the list is the fact that if biometric authentication is compromised - if someone finds a way to fake your voice or face or finger - you're up a brown and smelly creek without any way to propel your barbed wire canoe. If someone rips off a password of yours, you can change it. But if someone figures out a way to duplicate your fingerprint or voiceprint or retinal or iris ID, there's nothing you can do.
The limited number of biometrics each person carries around with them also makes it impossible to have a large number of different biometric keys. All this is only a problem, of course, if biometrics can be duplicated by normal human beings. That's the story, anyway. Using it Faking it out.
Internet of Things | Internet of Everything. Protecting from prying eyes. Mystery traffic redirection attack pulls net traffic through Belarus, Iceland. Tons of internet traffic is being deliberately diverted through locations including Belarus and Iceland, and intercepted by crooks or worse, security experts fear.
Network intelligence firm Renesys warns that victims including financial institutions, VoIP providers, and governments have been targeted by the man-in-the-middle attacks. It reckons the diversions are malicious, and probably pulled off by manipulating BGP routing tables. BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is a core routing protocol that maps out the connections for internet traffic to flow through, from source to destination. As things stand, BGP has no built-in security.
Routers may accept dodgy connection routes advertised by peers, internet exchanges or transit suppliers. These suspect routes, once accepted, can have local, regional or global effects. For years, we’ve observed that there was potential for someone to weaponize the classic Pakistan-and-YouTube-style route hijack.
All this was weird not to say suspicious. Spooky Business.
Resources & Tools for Research. FRA - Sweden. Surveillance Contractors. Homeland Security - United States of America. Aerial Surveillance. Notes from the ubiquitous surveillance society. In his book, To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov called the predominant contemporary technocentric politics, ‘solutionism’.
Surveillance may be one of the best contemporary examples of this trend, at least many surveillance technologies are promoted as a technological solution to some problem whose roots are in way ‘technological’ but social and economic, and therefore whose resolution, equally, must be social and economic. What got me thinking about this (again) was a little puff-piece in the Ottawa Citizen today, which presented panoramic thermal imaging as the ‘solution’ to the monitoring of the US-Canada border. Now, in recent history the formerly largely unguarded US-Canada has not really presented much of a problem to anyone. However, post-9/11 paranoia has recast the border as a source of threat, not least because of the widely believed myth that some of the hijackers entered the US through Canada. Like this: Like Loading...