Facial recognition can be used to help police identify the wrong person, monitor your visits to the Gap, and it is also used as a routine security measure by companies. It allows you to unlock your phone or log in to social media. Although this practice involves the exchange of privacy in return for security and comfort, a recent study found that it is essentially bogus.AdvertisementComputer scientists from Tel Aviv University, Israel claim they have found a way to bypass facial recognition systems. They do this by faking your appearance. This technique is called the master face, or a master key, Harhar. It uses artificial intelligence technology to create a facial template that can be used to unlock identity verification systems.Researchers write that their findings show that face-based authentication can be extremely vulnerable even though there is no information about the target's identity. Anti-spoofing techniques are often used to make face recognition systems more secure. To bypass these defenses, our method can be combined with other methods.According to the study, facial recognition systems use broad ranges of markers to identify individuals. It is possible to create facial templates that match many markers and fool a large number of security systems. The attack works because it creates faces similar to large portions of the population.The StyleGAN is a popular generative model of artificial Intelligence tech that creates digital images from human faces. This algorithm allows for the creation of the face-of-all-faces. Their face imprint was tested on 13,000 facial images from the University of Massachusetts. The team claims that it can unlock more than 20% of the identities in the repository. Other tests had even higher success rates.Researchers also suggest that deepfake technologies could be used to animate the face construct, fooling livingness detection methods.Although it is difficult to visualize the real-world implications of this hack, you can still picture them: A malcontented spy with this tech steals your phone and then uses the Omni-face-thing (to bypass device security) to nab all your data. Is this possible? Yes. Strangely plausible in a Mr. Is it a Mr. Robot kind of thing? Yes. Online accounts that use facial recognition to log in would be even more vulnerable.AdvertisementAlthough the jury is still out on the validity of these claims, it would be safe to add this to the growing literature suggesting that facial recognition is bad for everyone except cops and large corporations. Despite vendors claiming their technology is perfect, numerous studies have shown that many of these products are not ready for prime-time. These tools are easy to fool and don't work all the time, making them a good reason to be ditched.
