Identity, Security, Payments, Biometrics, Smart Cards and Authentication News

Biometric hack unveiled

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

A UK-based hacker has demonstrated a man in the middle attack aimed at biometrics. Matthew Lewis, of London-based Information Risk Management, unveiled the biologging attack at a Black Hat hacker conference in Amsterdam.

Lewis says biometric data is vulnerable because it isn’t encrypted between the sensor and the processor, according to the story in Techworld. The biologger captures the biometric data while its in transit between the two.


“Organizations across a number of different sectors are beginning to implement biometric systems as part of their physical and logical access controls, while a number of these systems and devices are configured to integrate with existing infrastructures for ease of deployment, such as through the use of IP protocols,” Lewis said in a recent white paper on biologging. “It is properties such as this that we seek to explore and exploit as part of a proof of concept construction of a biologger.”

The attacks would still be difficult to carry out, with the main obstacle being insertion of the biologic into the network, Lewis said.

Read the full story here[end] 

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