Imitate your own Government Minister

As we march ever forward to the government nirvana of universal identity cards and biometric controls on all lifes necessities (passports, hospitals, shopping?), it’s reassuring to know that the proposed measures will all be for the good of the individual and not as otherwise argued for the good of the state.

All the current raft of proposals are aimed squarely at making life easier and safer for all us. I therefore only out of passing interest include the two links below.

The first is a request to collect the Prime Ministers and Home Secretary’s fingerprints (not there actual fingers I hasten to add!) . Apparently this bunch of scaremongers want to highlight how easy it would be to actually collect biometric data from our glorious leaders. What this could hope to achieve one can only speculate (and I will further down this post).

These are indeed trying times and we need to support our Prime Minister and his able Home Secretary, Wacky Jacqui Smith through these troubling times.

Wacky Jacqui has in particular had a couple of bad weeks. The idiotic well received idea of forcing paedophiles to register email accounts with the government, a proposal so unworkable that it suggests that whoever thought of it does not know that you can have more than one email address is one of them.

The other being the ‘gaffe’ that all these databases containing all this collected information for our safety would be “unhackable” as they would all be kept offline. Firstly, to say something is unhackable is like providing a red rag to a bull, and secondly if this wasn’t a gaffe, then end users of the card would not be able to validate themselve against records kept in the database, therefore rendering the whole shebang worthless.

But even if for the sake of argument these databases were ‘offline’ and ‘unhackable’, it still doesn’t prevent someone obtaining biometric information from you (as shown below) or volunteering personal details with or without the aid of bribes.

Wanted Poster! A call for the UK Prime Minister’s fingerprints: “Wanted Poster! A call for the UK Prime Minister’s fingerprints

06/04/2008

Privacy International and the UK’s NO2ID have launched a campaign to show the dangers of the collection of fingerprints into central government databases. We are offering a reward for the first person to collect and submit the UK Prime Minister’s and Home Secretary’s fingerprints.

Around the world, politicians are now calling for the mass fingerprinting of foreigners. The UK is relatively unique in that the Government is calling for the collection of all ten fingerprints of all citizens and residents and placing them into a single centralised database for wide access by police, and other government agencies. The Government is clear that it wants to treat all citizens as though they are criminals, having promised the police that they can trawl through the fingerprint database for forensic purposes.

Following recent data breach scandals, including the loss of 25 million records on British families, we are not confident in the ability of the Government to secure this information. In fact, even the Government’s advisors, including the recent report for HM Treasury by Sir James Crosby argues against the collection of unique biometrics; but the Home Office insists that it will continue along this hazardous path. As fingerprinting systems expand to enable people to secure their computers, possessions and even homes, the centralisation of biometrics will increase the risks of breaches.

Building on the great work from the Chaos Computer Club in collecting the fingerprints of the German Interior Minister (see Der Spiegel and the Register articles (both links off-site)), we are campaigning to raise politicians’ awareness of the dangers of collecting this type of biometric data.

The poster is also available in higher resolution formats including PNG, PDF and jpeg.

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(Via .)

Wanted Poster! A call for the UK Prime Minister’s fingerprints

 

The second link is for one that most dangerous piece of confectionary ever to grace the sweet shop counter, the Gummy Bear. This benign looking piece of gelatin can actually be used as an anti-terrorism counter measure or by evil lurking gangs of identity thieves.

With years of practice (or 5 seconds via Google /a>) you could effectively bypass the whole fingerprint portion of the biometric security measure and render billions of British taxpayers money worthless.

Less scrupulous members of society than myself, may also put these pieces of information together and attempt to produce false government ministers IDs.

» Gummi Bears Can Also Fool Fingerprint Scanners » Blog Archive 
 Alice Hill’s Real Tech News - Independent Tech: “Gummi Bears Can Also Fool Fingerprint Scanners
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

About 6 months ago we ran a piece on how a finger made out of Play Doh could foil many retail fingerprint scanners. Not to be outdone, a Japanese cryptographer named Tsutomu Matsumoto has found that Gummi Bears make an even better fake fingerprint, and are the cornerstone of a do it yourself fake fingerprint lab that require bears, a digital camera, and a PC. According to Mastsumoto, the gelatin used to make Gummi bears can be poured into a mold to make a finger, and this fake finger was able to fool scanners 4 out of five times. Not to be outdone, using the fumes from superglue, Matsumoto was able to highlight a print from a drinking glass and photograph it with a digital camera, and then imprint the high res print on the gummi bear finger using a photo sensitive printed circuit board he picked up in a hobby shop. And it worked - so well that cryptography experts are recommending that these systems go right back to the drawing board.

Using PhotoShop, he improved the contrast of the image and printed the fingerprint onto a transparency sheet. Here comes the clever bit. Matsumoto took a photo-sensitive printed-circuit board (which can be found in many electronic hobby shops) and used the fingerprint transparency to etch the fingerprint into the copper. From this he made a gelatine finger using the print on the PCB, using the same process as before. Again this fooled fingerprint detectors about 80 per cent of the time. Matsumoto tried these attacks against eleven commercially available fingerprint biometric systems, and was able to reliably fool all of them. Source: The Register

We Say: No one mentioned that using the gummi bear method, you can not only ‘eat the evidence’, you get to enjoy a nice little candy snack in the process.

Alice Adds: While this story is not new, it is interesting to note that nothing has been done yet to fix the problem.”

(Via .)

» Gummi Bears Can Also Fool Fingerprint Scanners » Blog Archive 
 Alice Hill’s Real Tech News - Independent Tech

 

If you wanted to take it to its natural conclusion, with the creation of national DNA databases you could potentially clone your very own government minister. All you would need is access to a recently used Scotch glass, a gummy bear and one of those CD’s containing everyone in the worlds data that the government seem so able to protect.

That however would be pushing the boundaries of absurdity t0o far…