Engineered Irises Fool Eye-Scanners

"Remember that scene in Minority Report when the spider robots stalk Tom Cruise to his apartment and scan his iris to identify him?" That's the question that Wired asks at the start of its article about reversed-engineered irises. "Things could have turned out so much better for Cruise had he been wearing a pair of contact lenses embossed with an image of someone else’s iris. New research being released this week at the Black Hat security conference by academics in Spain and the U.S. may make that possible. The academics have found a way to recreate iris images that match digital iris codes that are stored in databases and used by iris-recognition systems to identify people. The replica images, they say, can trick commercial iris-recognition systems into believing they’re real images and could help someone thwart identification at border crossings or gain entry to secure facilities protected by biometric systems." Read more.