Wearing Someone Else’s Face: Biometric Technologies, Anti-spoofing and the Fear of the Unknown

ABSTRACT

Spoofing denotes attempts to cheat biometric technologies with artefacts (e.g. fake fingers, masks). This way of circumventing biometric systems has recently generated great interest in the line of work known as ‘anti-spoofing’, which is responsible for developing counter measures. Part of the work of biometric laboratories revolves around identifying imaginable spoofs and spoofers and developing technologies that can detect real from fake bodies. Based on fieldwork among researchers in a biometric lab and at at international conferences where policy-makers, security officials and industry discuss biometric technologies, the article shows how the figure of the spoofer epitomizes certain concerns and brings with it particular types of practices and threat scenarios. Biometric technologies, it is argued, are constantly changing shape in response to the imagined, potential threats embodied by the spoofer in, for example, state security contexts and at borders, where fears of the potential consequences of uncontrolled migration, terrorism and global crime prevail.

KEYWORDS:

• Biometric technologies
• laboratories
• spoofing
• masks
• face recognition

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the biometric researchers who generously allowed me to participate in their lab work and shared their thoughts and expertise with me, the participants of the Copenhagen workshop in 2017 for feedback and suggestions, my colleagues in the Border World project, and not least the Velux Foundation for its support of this project.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 These ‘modalities’ have been accepted as compliant with the biometric standards developed by the UN international civil aviation organisation (ICAO doc.9303:2015). Recently, facial images have also been included in EURODAC, the large EU database on asylum-seekers, in order to supplement fingerprints with facial recognition.

2 Finn points to rapidly changing migration regimes in the US as a case in point (Finn 2009: 118).

3 I am indebted to Mark Maguire for pointing out Fantômas to me in the context of our Copenhagen workshop in October 2017.

4 However, the branch of research named AFEA, Automated facial expression analysis is a branch of image processing, which focuses on training automated systems to read intentions and emotions from facial movements and expressions of the face. The supposed application is described as e.g. medical (for pain detection), but also as tied up with anticipatory security (eg. the detection of bad intent) see also Gates (2011).

5 Several developers and companies are working on a future of ‘seamless’ biometric tunnels that do not need the presence of border guards as they do today.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Velux Foundation: [Grant Number 10351].