There's a reason you should be terrified of iris scanners and iPhone facial recognition – but it's not the reason you think

I hate passwords. I forget them, I lose them, I agonise over someone stealing them. At work, I don’t change them when the system prompts me to. I get locked out of my computer and spend hours trying to regain access. The helpdesk hates me.

I’m a queen of the caps lock blunder too: not knowing I’ve struck the pesky key, I type in my password agonisingly – two, three, four times – only to be told to “please contact a system administrator”. And that usually happens last thing on a Friday. When my patience resembles a tissue that’s been through the washing machine. Twice.

So, as someone who likes to consider themselves relatively tech-savvy and reasonably receptive to new gadgets, you may therefore think that I would take to the idea of biometric identification like a duck to water. You’d be wrong. I’m terrified. And I’m going to tell you why you too should be afraid.

Last week, high street lender TSB announced that it was becoming the first bank in Europe to introduce iris recognition on its mobile banking app, allowing you to transfer money, check your balance and make payments, quite literally, in the blink of an eye.

To use the service, customers register by holding their phone camera up to their face for a few seconds. Experts have said that iris scanning is a far more secure form of biometric authentication than, say, voice recognition, fingerprints or toe prints (yes, that’s a thing) and that it’s fast, efficient and easy. For both you and that friendly criminal next door.

Earlier this year, a German hacking collective called the Chaos Computer Club – which incidentally also has a history of conquering the iPhone’s fingerprint sensor – fooled Samsung’s iris scanner, not with the assistance of cryptic programming language and unparalleled brain power, but with a simple photograph – the kind you can print off Facebook – and a humble contact lens.

It was the second security blow dealt to the South Korean conglomerate in the space of a few months, after its facial recognition technology – also designed to allow users to unlock their phones password-free – was tricked almost immediately after launching.

Read More...