Nguyen Minh Duc, a researcher at Bach Khoa Internetwork Security Centre, a Hanoi-based security firm that is commonly known as Bkis, showed how attackers could break into laptops from Lenovo, Toshiba and Asus featuring face-recognition technologies, simply by using digitized images of the actual user of the systems in each case. The attacks were conducted on a Lenovo system with its Veriface III technology, an Asus system featuring its Smart Logon software and a laptop using Toshiba's Face Recognition technology.

The attacks are possible because the underlying technology used by the vendors for face authentication can be easily fooled — meaning it cannot be trusted for secure log-on purposes, Minh Duc said. He claimed that each of the vendors has been notified of the issue and urged them to reconsider the use of face recognition as a secure log-in option until the problem has been fixed.

Continue reading...