Securely unlocking a smartphone with your own face is a very handy and highly requested feature. However, due to the technologies used in various facial recognition implementations, it is not as secure as fingerprints or long passwords.
Viewing facial features via a 2D camera tends to be fooled by something as simple as a printed photo, and we’ve seen that in the past.
More sophisticated methods using 3D capture of one’s own face will nullify the printed photo, but can still be tricked by a more sophisticated 3D printed mask. It is valid since day 1. The most sophisticated masks can unlock today’s most expensive phones.
Ultra realistic 3D masks to test. You can defeat the face unlock systems of modern phones
trinamiX GmbH introduces a new paradigm this makes it much more difficult to circumvent. His system checks that a real, living person looks at the sensors, and everything is hidden under a phone OLED screen, with no nicks involved. Now it only works with OLED displays, so cheaper screens with IPS LCD are not compatible.
The system is so powerful that it is already seen by the FIDO Alliancethe Biometric Security for Androidand the IIFA (International Internet Finance Authentication Alliance) as the new “gold standard” for mobile biometric security.
According to trinamiX, the system consists of an IR camera, a point projector and a floodlight. Essentially, this trio works in parallel with two types of face recognition: The first recognizes the face, as other systems do today. However, the second sees the presence of (living) human skin.
And this skin detection is what effectively defeats today’s best masks. Although these 3D-printed masks can be very precise in terms of geometry and color, they have a weak point: their surface does not reflect light like human skin.
This is a blast from the past because one of my former colleagues was working on real-time skin rendering (see the Advanced real-time skin rendering techniques chapter of GPU Gems 3 Book). It was then that I was first confronted with the fact that human skin consists of several layers, some of which are slightly transparent.
Incident light penetrates the skin, bounces inwards and some of it is reflected outwards, creating the typical soft appearance of the skin that we are all familiar with. The hardware design of trinamiX precisely recognizes this reflection signature of the human skin below the surface.
It does this thanks to its point projector and by analyzing how the light spreads around each point. Any other material will reflect in a completely different way, and these are 3D printed masks that cannot fool trinamiX facial authentication. If you’re wondering, their system is flexible enough to work with face masks and can be tuned to different situations via software (or AI).
Essentially, TrinamiX made it much harder for would-be hackers to build a 3D mask that could bypass their liveness detection. Someone could create a “Mission Impossible” type mask that perfectly mimics the reflection of human skin, but that has yet to be proven.
In addition, trinamiX says its design can be built the same budget as existing ultrasonic fingerprint readersusing various sets of affordable sensors that OEMs can choose from based on their vendor preferences.
trinamiX Face Authentication at Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit 2022
Finally, this facial authentication system has already been demonstrated with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 platform using the Snapdragon Trusted Execution Environment block, which ensures complete privacy and security of biometric data.
We’ll hopefully see ultra-secure facial recognition in 2023. I sincerely hope that we’ll hide both face and fingerprint readers under OLED displays, as both are incredibly handy in different circumstances. It looks like Android will have the upper hand when it comes to face unlock security.
Filed in . Read more about Android, Security and Snapdragon Summit.
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