Laptop Facial Recognition Takes Hard Blow
Facial recognition is one of the very well known methods employed by biometric security systems. It’s used in different complicated security systems, but also on more day-to-day devices, such as laptops.
A group of white hat security researchers have recently managed to bypass the facial recognition systems employed by several laptops. According to the Register, the laptops that have had their biometric security breached are developed by Lenovo, Asus and Toshiba. The researchers’ team includes and they have also detailed their findings in a presentation called Your Face is NOT your Password during the Blackhat security conference in Washington.
You might wonder if it was hard to breach the facial recognition systems. The team responsible for this breaches used images of laptop owners or photoshopped images:
Nguyen and his team created a large number of images to run what they described a “fake face bruteforce” attack to fool the systems, which in fairness are still in their infancy, into allowing a log-on. The approach can be compared to trying out a huge number of possible text passwords until the right combination is stumbled upon as part of a conventional brute-force dictionary attack.
While trying to find a practical security use for biometric traits, the developers at Lenovo, Asus and Toshiba should reconsider the efficiency of their facial recognition software. We admire the fact that they lead research and implementation in the field, but we’d appreciate safer systems more 
