I was reading this blog, where they had this post named Switch Fingerprints To Trick Hi-Tech Cops which gave details of an incident that actually made me ponder upon how insecure our biometric security techniques can sometime be.

The post gave details of an incident to testify that. A lady named Lin Ring was deported from Japan named Lin Ring was deported from Japan in the year 2007. To be allowed at the airport, Lin Ring very ingeniously got her finger prints hacked – Ring got the left finger print to right, and the right to left. That was smart. However, this din’t help work. Immigration officers suspected the scars on her fingers and got into action. Needless to mention that Lin Ring was caught.

According to the post Lin had got her surgery done at a private clinic after paying about 9000 pounds ($ 14600). Good money, I would say, but not good enough to hide the wounds. Lin Ring had smartly worked her way out, but those faded scars were enough to send out the smell of crime and get officers alerted.

The iris recognition (it is a method of biometric recognition which uses an individual’s iris pattern. Iris recognition uses camera technology) system was probably an outcome of such incidents. And this system (iris recognition) is not smart hackers to hack}. But then it has other disadvantages to it like, unclear picture quality, effective only from a very close distance, and will take good time to reach all security places as the money that goes into setting up the entire system is too high.

Also, commercial iris recognition systems can be fooled easily by giving them an accurate picture of the face and not the real face that needs to be tested.

Nevertheless, iris recognition if implemented everywhere can really help strengthen security.