I was reading this blog, where they had this post titled Switch Fingerprints To Trick Hi-Tech Cops which gave details of an incident that actually made me think about how insecure our biometric security techniques can sometime be.

The post gave details of an incident to testify that. A lady named Lin Ring was deported from Japan named Lin Ring was deported from Japan in the year 2007. To be allowed tarvel, Lin Ring very ingeniously got her finger prints hacked – Ring got the left finger print to right, and the right to left. That was smart. However, that din’t really work. Immigration officers suspected the scars on her fingers and started the investigation. Needless to mention that Lin Ring was caught.

According to the post Lin had got her surgery done at a private clinic after paying about 9000 pounds ($ 14600). Good money, I would say, but not good enough to escape the officers. Lin Ring had smartly worked her way out, but those faded scars were enough to send out the smell of crime and alert the officers.

The iris recognition (it is a method of biometric recognition which uses an individual’s iris pattern. It uses camera technology) system was perhaps an outcome of such incidents. And this system (iris recognition) is not smart hackers to hack}. But then it has other disadvantages to it like, poor picture quality, effective only from a very close distance, and will take few years to reach all security places as the investment that goes into setting up the entire system is too high.

Also, commercial iris recognition systems can be fooled easily by giving them a clear picture of the face and not the real face that needs to be tested.

Nevertheless, iris recognition if carried out everywhere can really reduce crime rate.