Windows Hello isn’t fooled by identical twins
24 August, 2015
category: Biometrics, Corporate, Digital ID
At this point you’ve seen the commercial touting how a toddler won’t have to remember passwords but will be able to login with a smile.
This is all part of Windows Hello, the new identity and biometric system baked into Windows 10. The system will support face, finger and iris biometrics depending on the type of hardware available.
Facial recognition is becoming a popular option as some of the latest notebooks feature a RealSense camera made by Intel. The cameras are embedded above the display. The system uses three cameras — featuring an infra-red lens, a regular lens and a 3-D lens — and uses photographic analysis, heat detection and depth detection to decide who is at your computer display, according to a report in the Australian, which performed an interesting test with the system. The author had great success using the facial recognition system but decided to test it with six sets of identical twins, varying in age, to see if it could spot the differences.
For the experiment the Australian had one of the twins register into the system and interact with it several times on the Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga 14. It then had the other twin attempt to use the same system to access the accounts.
The system performed well and didn’t let any of the unauthorized twins access. At the same time the system sometimes didn’t enable the authorized twin access but the system performed well in the small experiment.
Windows Hello will work with Microsoft Passport and enable user to use biometrics to login to web sites as well.
