A Chinese woman, Lin Rong, has been deported from Japan for overstaying her visa. To get back into the counter she had plastic surgery to alter her fingerprints. In doing so she illegally entered Japan by fooling immigration controls. The plastic surgery cost $15,000 to have the surgery in China where the doctors switched her fingerprints from her left hand to her right hand. In doing so she was able to fool the fingerprint scanners. According to the police it is the first case of biometric fraud and is becoming a more widespread and common practice. She was eventually caught on a separate charge when she was faking a marriage with a Japanese man. The police noticed unnatural scars on her fingers and later concluded she had surgery to fool immigration fingerprint scanners.
This case shows the ability of illegal immigration into controls that have hi-tech controls. $15,000 is really that much when you consider how much it means to gain access to a country like the United States. The root cause of this intrusion is we rely on technology to identify persons. We talked in class about different authentication practices and how one could fool a fingerprint scanner by cutting someone's finger off and scanning it. This seemed unreasonable at the time, but who knows now? There may be a black market for people to give up their finger prints to illegal immigrants so that they can gain access to the United States and other countries.
To combat this there needs to be other forms of authentication to identify illegal immigrants other than fingerprinting. I'm not sure how it works for the US, but in countries like Japan new measures need to be adopted to deter surgeries like swapping fingerprints. It creates a black market of unnecessary surgeries.
source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8400222.stm
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
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I think it is crazy to think that a woman would go through all that trouble to gain access into our country. I guess that is why we live in the best country in the world. Anyways, I now understand why fingerprint alone are not sufficient measures to protect access to confidential files or hardware. Biometrics scanners such as palm readers today are not sufficient enough as well. There need to be a better and more sophisticated process when protecting materials and not just allowing people to access our country.
ReplyDeleteThe Mythbusters episode we saw in class earlier in the semester comes to mind when reading this post. I just can clearly recall how easily and capable it was to recreate a fingerprint that sufficiently unlocked the door. Thus, it seems to me that fingerprint security is not as stringent as popular opinion might assume.
ReplyDeleteFirst reaction: ewww and ouch! That is a heck of a lot of trouble to go through in order to fool immigration, though I realize that some people may be desperate enough to do it. Seems kind of like a case from the show(s) CSI. I think that it is cases like these that will eventually lead law enforcements to stop and inspect everyone's fingerprints at a checkpoint to make sure that they are legitimate (i.e. not scarred, etc.), as these events are becoming more frequent. I'm curious to see what other forms of biometrics will be developed in order to compensate for these ones that people are seeming to find ways around. I know that they have eye scans and hand geometry. Maybe one day they'll have super-accelerated DNA checks where all they need is a sample of your hair. Who knows.
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