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"Distrust and caution are the parents of security" - Benjamin Franklin
The insides of our ears are a mysterious place for most of us. It turns out, however, that there’s more going on in there than we expected. In a study presented at the IEEE Fourth International Conference on Biometrics in September of 2010, researchers used a shape-finding algorithm to determine – with 99.6 percent success rate – someone’s identity by studying the shape of their outer ear.
Japan’s Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology (.PDF) has developed a system that they believe is capable of authenticating a person’s identity by performing a series of measurement on that person’s posterior. The system relies on a seat equipped with 400 pressure sensitive sensors that can detect the contours of an individual’s derriere.
Researchers at Bath University have unveiled a system where noses, not fingerprints or irises, could be scanned and used for biometric authentication. Using a system called PhotoFace, first developed at the University of the West of England Bristol and Imperial College London, individuals had photos of their noses taken four times, each in different lighting, to determine which category their nose fall under. The software found six main nose types: Roman, Greek, Nubian, Hawk, Snub and Turn-up.
Last year researchers from Cornell took a Microsoft Xbox and tweaked its Kinect motion sensing device to analyze what exactly people are doing – be it brushing their teeth, cooking or writing. The device is based around a webcam-like peripheral that uses a RGBD (Red, Green, Blue, Depth) camera.
Fed up with using swipe cards and PINs for their students’ lunch payments, a school board district in Clearwater, Fla. recently partnered with microelectronic company Fujitsu to use palm vein readers for nearly half of their 102,000 students. Pinellas County School Board District spent $120,000 to implement 300 machines that rely on vascular biometrics to read, encrypt and store images of students’ hands. Unlike other devices, the palm vein readers scan students’ palm patterns via near-infrared light and don’t require contact with the children’s hands.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the wellspring of U.S. government technology innovation. Now the agency is looking at what they’ve called a “cognitive fingerprint.” DARPA’s main goal with the project is to bypass what’s become the “current standard method,” for authentication: memorizing long passphrases.
Researchers at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon have been working on software that doesn’t analyze what passwords are typed, but rather how words are typed.
The British Comedy troupe Monty Python famously joked about the strange strides emanating from the farcical Ministry of Funny Walks. But even normal looking walks can be quite distinctive. According to researchers at Shinshu University in Tokida, Japan, computers aided by 3D image processing technology can identify an individual with up to 90% accuracy just based on their gait.
In 2009, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security hatched a plan to use body-odor as a method of identifying individuals. The DHS wanted to establish odor based biometric signatures that could uniquely identify both friend and foe. It then might be able to determine if changes in odor could be used as a tool to provide evidence of deception. Civil liberty groups cried foul.
A new series of mass-injections have been targeting Wordpress sites as of late and appear to have already infected more than 200,000 web pages according to a report on Websense’s Security Labs blog earlier this week.
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