Biometrics have come a long way. In the old days I had a credit card with a bank that used what we in the trade call “active voice bio”. And, to set up my active voice biometric I was supposed to say “My voice is my favorite password” or something geeky like that to bypass further call center authentication.
Cut to present. There are so many service providers that have built great tools that take just one minute of any John Doe’s voice input to impersonate the speaker. Some examples are Lyrebird, Respeecher, Descript, Adobe etc. Voice bio went out of fashion quicker than cold shoulder tops. Thankfully. Yes, for both.
Along came fingerprint biometric with the Aadhar card. Soon enough, I started to see videos on YouTube where fraudsters replicated thumbprints with Fevicol and paper plates 🙂 Old school. And amusing too. But one would have thought it was hardly scalable. So, here’s one for scale. I read about the way fraudsters were scaling up biometric authentication in a scam run out of Nagpur, involving the issuance of new SIM cards by capturing peoples’ biometrics in the name of the “Ayushman Yojana” to later link new fraudulent mule accounts to them. Clever.
Now here’s my pet peeve with Aadhar bio. Fraudsters are successfully passing other peoples’ biometrics. And here I am, unable to pass my own biometric. Somehow, I don’t leave prints! Friends call it the superpower serial killers would die for. Others waiting behind me in Aadhar authentication queues, don’t find it funny at all.
So, when iPhones started FaceID I was delighted. Goodbye fingerprint, hello face! FaceID was going to be the new fraud killer. But fraudsters didn’t waste a lot of time in coming up with deep fakes to disrupt all that. With Tom Cruise, the favorite poster boy for the deep fake mafia. Banks and IDV service providers fought over each other with solutions like liveness checks & selfies. And this is gonna sound insane. There was a post I watched which beat liveness tests. From all angles. (With samples of usual suspects Elon Musk, Zuck etc.), reducing digital KYC to a joke.
But let’s not write off biometrics yet. There’s palm print, retina, iris scan, gait recognition. Wow.
True Story. Recently, I was called on by a batch mate for analysing a brand-new biometric solution proposed by an Israeli company. (Somehow Israelis are always operating at the cutting edge.) Great, let me guess. The unique frequency pattern of my sneeze? Ok. Umm is it a signature vomit? Wait. Then I would have to barf every time I make a payment. ROFL. We laughed over some ridiculous extensions of that line of jokes and once the giggling died, turns out it was actually quite a cool idea. (The product is under patent, but I’m not at liberty to disclose.)