Charlie's Diary

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Thu, 27 Oct 2005

And enough of that ...

I'm going to drop the biometrics topic for a while. (Stand by for something completely different.)

In the meantime, I'd just like to add that the uncorrected proofs of the Ace trade paperback of "The Atrocity Archives" arrived today, and they look great! It's officially on sale as of January 3rd, and I'll add a "buy it now" link shortly.



posted at: 14:06 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Flawed reasoning

I said (last week) I'd dissect Dave's responses to my comments on biometric payments. Having had time to digest them, I'm not sure such a dissection is necessary. Rather, I'd like to make some observations:

Firstly, Dave is right in one key observation -- that Visa, Mastercard, and the other card issuing agencies screw the merchants with their fees and the public with their interest rates. (Here in the UK, Barclaycard, one of the most respectable -- and biggest -- card issuers, charges as standard an APR of around 19% on outstanding balances on their credit cards. This is in the context of a bank base rate almost 14% power. Such interest rate gouging is normally associated with loan sharks, and their treatment of small merchants is little better.)

Moreover, the credit/debit card infrastructure is an improvised Heath-Robinson lashup. What originated as a modest voucher-payment system aimed at business travellers in the 1950s has sprouted into a monstrous half-assed identity verification system using a combination of cards and passwords (your PIN) that provide access to the banking system for virtually everyone. Additional features have been bolted on top of the original specifications, compromising the security and integrity of the system. Nobody in their right mind would have designed a system like this, but nobody in their right mind did so -- it just sort of grew, and replacing it is, on the face of things, a good idea.

However, replacing the existing infrastructure purely because the proposed replacement is cheaper is not the right reason.

One of the things I picked up during my time inside Datacash is that the business of banking is not, at heart, about lending money: it's about managing risk. If you extend credit to people, and in return they refund the loans and pay you fees or interest, your profits depend not only on the interest rate, but on the proportion of borrowers who default on their payments. It also depends on the degree to which you are exposed to fraud. Identity theft is the current fashionable form of fraud carried out by individuals and small groups of criminals, because flaws in the existing banking and credit infrastructure make it relatively easy to perpetrate.

Now, biometric systems in general do not prevent fraud. All they can achieve is to verify that an individual possessing certain physical characteristics was involved in one or more transactions. (Furthermore, the error rate is sufficiently high in most systems that you may not even be able to prove that much.) If you can obtain biometrically authenticated identification tokens using, say, a stolen birth certificate or the birth certificate of a baby who died at the age of 18 months in a foreign country (and who has therefore not had a death certificate filed in their country of birth) you can quite easily masquerade as someone else -- and because biometric ID is being mis-sold as a tool for providing proof of identity, rather than as a mechanism for confirming continuity of identity a successful identity thief who has equipped themselves with valid biometrics is in a position to manipulate the trust we place in these supposedly infallible markers (as the biometrics companies would like us to believe in them).

If I have a beef with the deployment of biometrics, it's not so much with micropayment systems such as BioPay's -- where the amount at stake is low -- but with the systematic misrepresentation by government agencies of an intrusive government identity registry as a security feature. Rather than going into it at length here I'd just like to refer interested readers to comments by Microsot UK's National Technology Officer, Jerry Fishenden, who warns that the UK ID card scheme will trigger massive identity fraud, to Barry Kefauver of the International Civil Aviation Organization who says that biometric passports alone won't counter terrorism threats, and to Bruce Schneier who points out that biometric identification systems are no stronger than the protocol used to register a new user on the system (which is to say, they're as weak as the weakest acceptable documentation required to obtain an ID).

Biometrics are only really useful when there's a trusted path from the reader to the verifier, and when new identities on the system are confirmed with a high degree of precision. If there's a loose link in the chain -- for example, if fingerprint data are sent over a data network for authentication using weak encryption, or if documents are mailed via fraud-riddled postal services where they can be intercepted by criminals, they offer no additional margin of security over existing practices -- and indeed, may make things much worse because of the widespread perception that biometrics prove identity rather than indicating continuity.

[Discuss criminal futures]



posted at: 14:02 | path: /sing | permanent link to this entry

specials:

Is SF About to Go Blind? -- Popular Science article by Greg Mone
Unwirer -- an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction
Inside the MIT Media Lab -- what it's like to spend a a day wandering around the Media Lab
"Nothing like this will be built again" -- inside a nuclear reactor complex


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