As you are probably aware of by now the N50 comes equipped with software that performs facial recognition and fingerprint scanning for login. Today I’m to see how good they actually work and if they can be fooled MacGyver style. I have accepted a long time ago I’m no James Bond, so no fancy gadgets for me, just whatever I could find around the house would have to do.
Before I could start testing the software I had to enrol my fingerprints and let the software take a couple of photos of me. Just to show you how the enrollment of fingerprints works I have included a little video.
I figured the facial recognitions would be the easiest to fool so I tried some photos I had laying around the house but due to their glossy coating the camera couldn’t recognise any faces in the pictures. As all my photos are printed on glossy paper that plan went straight out of the window and I went to plan B which was to take a new picture and print that. Using a normal print on plain paper I was able to establish a facial lock yet it didn’t seem to recognise the picture as being me, not matter how I tried (making a fool out of myself in the process while dangling it in front of the camera). Plan C was to reduce the accuracy required in the software but even on its lowest setting it wouldn’t let me in.
As I don’t own a fingerprinting kit I tried lifting some of the lid using sticky tape but only ended up with partials or overlapping prints. In desperation I just made a fresh print using the correct finger. Digging through my girlfriend’s makeup I found what I needed to make the print stand out more. Using a plastic finger protector which I still had kicking about I tried to use the lifted print on the scanner, with no success. In all honestly this didn’t surprise me much considering it’s hard enough to get it to read your print in the best of times. Although once you have got the knack it scans relatively easily.
Overall my attempts to fool the system failed miserably. When I think about it, this should not have come as a big surprise. I already noticed earlier on that the facial recognition was very temperamental and only seemed to work well if I had the same hairstyle, glasses, lighting conditions and in my particular case the blue high back chair. My best guess is that instead of using facial recognition algorithms to calculate the position of the main features of your face in relation to each other, it compares the cropped pictures it took of your face (and in my case the chair) and tries to match this against the webcam feed. So although the software can recognise that there is indeed a face in the photo it “pictures matches” that face instead of biometrically matching it.
Where the fingerprint scanner at least has some real security applications I don’t think the same can be said about the facial recognition camera. It never seems to get passed the “gimmick” stage for me. As gimmicks go it’s a good one but not one with real security applications. In many cases typing in the password was considerably quicker than waiting for the webcam to start, get a facial lock and login, which kind of spoils it for me. But it will certainly make people go “ooh” and “aah” if you show it to them. The fingerprint scanner on the other hand works quite fast once you get used to it and really adds to the overall package.
Do keep in mind that it’s all still pretty much dependent on how strong your actual password is. Even if the fingerprinting and facial recognitions do their job, if your password is weak or stuck with a post-it on the bottom of your laptop it makes absolutely no difference.
