Episode 97: Investigating the iris attack

The 2012 Black Hat conference made headlines claiming iris biometrics had been hacked. But don't go sounding the warning alarms quite yet. While it's true that researchers discovered a potential vulnerability, there are countermeasures in place that make the hack impossible, or at least improbable, in the real world. Regarding ID's Gina Jordan spoke with Arun Ross, associate professor at West Virginia University, who was one of the researchers on the project. "It is good to know about these vulnerabilities, but what is more important is to report the fact that there are countermeasures in place that can potentially deflect these attacks," Ross says. "Vulnerabilities have to be reported because that would allow researchers worldwide to further develop algorithms that can successfully make their systems robust to future attacks."