One Flaw With Biometrics

Biometrics, the use of unique details about people’s bodies such as fingerprints or patterns on the retina, are hot in the security industry. Do they live up to the hype? Probably not:

Police in Malaysia are hunting for members of a violent gang who chopped off a car owner’s finger to get round the vehicle’s hi-tech security system.

Beating fingerprint systems doesn’t require violence; one researcher was able to do so by reproducing a latent fingerprint in gelatin. Still, this incident shows that security is a little more complex than fads allow.