Snippings

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“In June the Financial Action Task Force (FATF; pronounced ‘fat F’) published a much anticipated, technically nonbinding guidance detailing expectations of how its 37 member jurisdictions should regulate their respective ‘virtual asset’ marketplaces. Here’s the contentious part: whenever a user of one exchange sends cryptocurrency worth more than 1,000 dollars or euros to a user of a different exchange, the originating exchange must ‘immediately and securely’ share identifying information about both the sender and the intended recipient with the beneficiary exchange. That information should also be made available to ‘appropriate authorities on request.’”

From “New Guidelines Significantly Impacting Cryptocurrecy Exchanges | PaymentsJournal”.

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Perhaps we should be more optimistic though, as a raise a more knowing, media-savvy generation. According Harper’s Index for April 2019, Americans over 65 are seven times more likely to share stories from fake news sites than those aged between 18 and 29.

Biometrics are Best

Why am I so keen on biometrics for SSCA? Well, let me take you back to what I wrote about the launch of the iPhone 5 with TouchID (which was, of course, always a misleading label: it should be called TouchAuthenticate, but more on this later). Here’s an amalgam of the conversations I had with different people following that 2013 announcement:

Person: Do you know that fingerprints can be faked? I heard about a Japanese guy who did it with jelly babies or something?

Me: Yes, I know.

Person: Your fingerprints are all over your phone, people could easily steal them.

Me: Yes, I know.

Person: Criminals might be able to find a way to make a fake finger and use it to buy songs on iTunes using your iPhone.

Me: Yes, I know.

Person: Do you know that researchers were able to reconstruct useable 3D models of fingers by accessing stored fingerprint templates?

Me: Yes, I know.

Person: So would you use the new Apple TouchID on your next iPhone?

Me: Of course.

If I sounded complacent about the possibility of agents of foreign powers delving into my iPhone, it’s because I was. The key point I was making is that Apple TouchID/FaceID and the Android equivalents are not really about security, they are about convenience, a point I made on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme at the time. Convenience is something at which Apple excel. That may not seem like much, but when you are at the front of the queue on the bus, or checking it at British Airways, or showing a ticket for an event or trying to show a loyalty card in a shop using and paying in Starbucks using their app, then touching or looking at your phone rather than entering PIN is nice. And there will be a bunch of people who currently don’t lock their mobile phones but will because of the fingerprint or faceprint.

So are these biometrics more secure than a 4-digit passcode that can easily be read over someone’s shoulder? Yes. Will such biometrics replace 4-digit passcodes? No. You will still have a passcode for the odd occasion when your fingerprint can’t be read or for when your wife wants to look up something on IMDB on your iPhone and can’t be bothered to go into the other room and get her smartphone. As I wrote even before the iPhone 5 launched, Apple understands the location of biometrics in the consumer space: convenience, and Apple is all about convenience. Remember, consumer mobile devices aren’t going to be used to launch nuclear missiles or identify people in databases (I hope), so the combination of possession of the phone and possession of a face are sufficient for most purposes.

To see why, it’s important to reinforce the distinction between authentication and identification. When I open my Barclays app on my iPhone, it uses FaceID to authenticate me. It matches a template of my face against a stored template of the face of the owner. That’s authentication. It’s a very different problem from, for example, taking a template of my face and then attempting to match it against the faces of everyone in the Home Office passport database before popping up “hello David G.W. Birch”.

Doing away with a phone (or a card or a chip in your head) and just going with biometrics is a different issue. Biometric identification is a much harder problem and is fraught with difficulties. It can work very well with limited populations, which is why it is being installed in airports all over the place. I rather like the system going in to Chinese airports where when you walk up to one of the screens displaying flight information it switches to displaying your flight only. Very helpful. And earlier this year at KnowID in Las Vegas I saw a super presentation from US Customs and Border Control talking about the specific use of biometrics in airports as an interesting example of how to use biometric technologies for security but at the same time deliver convenience into the mass market. The investments made in biometrics to allow paperless travel have obvious benefits in terms of security but, as we have found in our other work about the cross-sector exploitation of digital identity, intelligent use of these new capabilities can also transform the customer experience. The same biometric system that scans your passport picture on entry to the airport and then checks you in for your flight can also be used to direct you through the airport and implement smart departure boards that as you approach them switch from displaying a list of all flights to displaying your flight only.

You can imagine this kind of system being extended to retailers and banks. Having been to the AmazonGo

When I go to the airport, however, I want to be identified. I’m already a member of a subgroup of the general population (ie, people who are flying from that airport on that day) and I want to co-operate in being identified to make my journey more convenient. It’s a different matter when  you are dealing with the population as a whole, not a self-selected subgroup, including people who don’t want to be identified. The Metropolitan Police have revealed that their facial recognition technology incorrectly identified members of the public in 96% of matches made between 2016 and 2018. So, round off, that’s in practical terms all matches that were incorrect.

Hhhmmmm…..

One particularly interesting aspect of biometric identification is its amusing susceptibility to what is known as “adversarial” biometrics. If you know how a face recognition algorithm works, for example, then you can deliberately choose to wear make-up or some disguise that exploits the characteristics of that algorithm. In fact, as it turns out, it is all too easy to do this and to do it in such a way as to give the recognition algorithms high confidence that they have correctly identified something. When it comes to picture recognition, the results can be hilarious (and disturbing). MIT researchers found that Google’s AI-powered open source “Inception” picture classifier can be easily fooled. Take a picture of a cat, add some “noise” that is imperceptible to people and the computer thinks it is looking a guacamole (this is a real example). There are techniques, such as Adversarial Generative Networks (AGNs), that can automatically create images to fool the recognition algorithms!

Master criminals may not need to resort to such sophisticated algorithmic skullduggery to get away with 

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The use of unique mobile identifier services will put more than $7 billion into the pockets of mobile operators in 2024, according to a new estimate from Juniper Research.

From Mobile ID Services Expected To Enrich Mobile Operators 08/13/2019.

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The most valuable part of the Verify system, as far as the remaining IDPs are concerned, is the Document Checking Service (DCS), a tool that allows them to check a user’s passport or driving licence against data held by HM Passport Office (HMPO) and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).

From Why Gov.uk Verify faces a critical few months – again – Computer Weekly Editor’s Blog.

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I always enjoy reading The Economist’s Science and Technology section. Generally speaking, I find most of the articles interesting, even if they are not practically relevant to anything and I am working on. In a recent edition (27th of July) however I found the piece that absolutely fascinated me. Nothing to do with computers, or electronic money or digital identity. It was this piece about lenses.
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 For a group of engineers at Columbia University, in New York, led by Nanfang Yu, has worked out how to make magnifying lenses that are flat, and thinner than a hair.

From How to make a flat lens – The seed of light. 

The invention of microscopically thin flat lenses that can be manufactured using the same nano lithographic techniques are used to making computer chips opens up all sorts of new technological advances in everything from cameras and contact lenses to microscopes and, of course, smart spectacles.

 

It can do this because its surface is covered with millions of tiny antennae. These antennae are of different designs, each with a cross section smaller than the average wavelength of the light it is interacting with, and are arranged in concentric circles (see picture). The antennae scatter the light falling on them in such a way that, when the individual changes are added up, the combined effect is the same as if different parts of the beam had passed through the lens at different speeds.

Dr Yu is not the first person to make a lens in this way, but previous efforts worked only with single colours, and also required the light to be polarised. Dr Yu’s lens works with all colours and in natural light, which is unpolarised.

In practice, few optical systems other than eyeglasses rely on single lenses. Usually, different lenses with different properties are stacked on top of each other to remove aberrations and achieve full-colour wide-angle images. Dr Yu’s lenses can be stacked in this way, too. By sandwiching three of them together, he has created a triplet that achieves almost all the control of light waves that would be expected of bigger and heavier glass-lens systems.

From How to make a flat lens – The seed of light.

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Besides saving weight and volume, Dr Yu’s flat lenses also promise to be cheaper to mass produce than the conventional sort. Grinding and polishing a glass lens is complex and time-consuming. Flat lenses are made using nanolithographic techniques, which are also employed for making computer chips. Given these advantages, flat lenses could replace their bulkier counterparts anywhere that cost or weight is an issue—meaning pretty-well everywhere from microscopes and cameras, to pairs of spectacles.

From How to make a flat lens – The seed of light.

The article caught my eye (nope unintended) because I’ve always found optics interesting. When I went to university to study Physics, one of the topics I was especially interested in was lasers and electrooptics. In fact, as I recall, one of the reasons that I chose Southampton University was that they had a research group in this area and when I was doing my UCCA forms (I don’t know if they still have those) and my visits to universities — remember my I am from that generation who were the first in their family to go to university so I had no nothing to go on — it was the laser stuff going on there that grabbed me.

Although my final year dissertation was on the highly theoretical and mathematical topic of symmetry groups (I was very good at maths but very bad of physics, so this was a good choice for me), my final year practical project was on the construction and measurement of gas lenses. You make a gas lens by pumping gas down a heated tube so that the temperature gradient from the centre of the tube to the edge forms a continuously changing medium of varying refractive index. When you shine a laser down the middle of it, the differential refractive index serves to focus the laser beam.

(If it hadn’t been for the invention of continuously-rolled glass fibre, gas lenses could have been huge! How else can you transmit laser beams across the Atlantic, for example!)

Working out how to predict the performance of the lens depends on some fiendishly complicated mathematical functions called “confluent hypergeometrics”. My part of the project was to write Fortran to solve these equations to predict the characteristics of the lens, while my partner Kevin’s part of the project was to actually build the damn thing out of bits of drainpipe and gaffer tape!

 

Astonishingly, the calculations and the reality were close enough to jazz and we got a passing grade that helped me to scrape an Honours degree. 

Amongst the voices calling for something to be done about the lack of a digital identity infrastructure (voices that include, for example, mine and Mark Carney’s) is that of the former Prime Minister Tony Blair who has called for “a proper identity system in the UK” to underpin digital government. I’m not sure what he means by “proper” but I’ll take it to mean well-thought out, practical and effective. You may recall that the national identity card scheme introduced under Mr. Blair (the “PA card”) was none of these things.

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As the clock ticks down towards the end of March 2020, when further public investment in Verify ceases and the system is taken on by the private sector, significant questions remain over the viability of Verify.

From Why Gov.uk Verify faces a critical few months – again – Computer Weekly Editor’s Blog.

 

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I wonder why things will be any different this time? Suppose the outcome of the current government’s consultation on digital identity is 

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“In this industry, you got clubs. You got bottles. You got models. You have strippers,” [Mr. Floyd “A1” Bentley] said. “They want to get paid right away, and they really don’t be wanting them checks.”

From Rap Music Ditches Dollars for the Cash App Mobile Payment System – WSJ.

I really don’t be wanting them cheques either, and it drives me crazy when US companies insist on paying using this ridiculous antiquated and inconvenient medieval mechanism. My heart sinks when I open the mail and find a cheque. It’s like finding out you’ve got some homework to do.

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PBoC officials voiced worries that [Libra] could have destabilising effects on the financial system and stated the bank would step up its own efforts to create an e-currency.

From PBoC sounds alarm over Facebook’s Libra – Central Banking.

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The [Bundesbank] took a light-touch approach to digital currencies such as Libra… Other central banks, such as the People’s Bank of China, have been more hostile towards Facebook’s digital currency project.

From Bundesbank takes light-touch approach to Libra – Central Banking.

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