The Future is Now
After months of speculation, it looks like Apple is about to revolutionize the world of mobile security. According to Bloomberg, by the end of the year the next generation iPhone will rely on 3D authentication rather than thumbprints. This is (to borrow a line from Anchorman) kind of a big deal. Here’s why:
When Apple introduced its Touch ID system in 2013, the company advertised it as unhackable. As it turns out, it only took a few weeks for some enterprising folks to crack the supposedly impervious security feature with a piece of tape. In fact, the porous nature of Touch ID is a major reason why Apple Pay has fallen flat. After all, why would anyone trust their secure payments to a system that can’t outsmart a gummy bear?
The idea behind fingerprints for verification on mobile devices is sound, and it’s miles better than relying on passwords because it takes a lot more work to crack a fingerprint than a string of characters. But even though the philosophy behind it is great, the execution has been pretty awful. Facial recognition seems like it would be a better fit but, like fingerprint readers, technology that reads faces can easily be spoofed with photographs and even other mobile phones. Even iris scanners have proven to be no better.
That’s where 3D verification comes in. Literally all of the ways that clever hackers have used to sneak past existing biometric tools won’t work in three dimensions. The key to this is what’s called depth authentication. In simple terms, that means that instead of just measuring front-facing measurements (such as the distance between a user’s eyes), it takes advantage of front-to-back measurements that can’t be spoofed using a photograph. That’s a huge leap forward.
It’s also what SensibleVision has been doing for over a decade. Our company has six patents related to facial recognition, and we were the first company to prove that 3D identity protection could be done. Of course, we were a little ahead of the curve – most phones didn’t even have two-dimensional cameras when we developed our technology! But it looks like 2017 is going to be the year when the hardware catches up to the software and mobile device makers are ready to make 3D verification part of their security stacks.
And device manufacturers can finally start getting serious about security.
(image: MichaelFrey "French and German Gummy bears" CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ )