Skip to main content

Voice Biometrics: Advantages and Disadvantages

Pros:
Less prone to compromise: Contrary to PIN/ Passwords storages compromised and stolen and replayed, the voice prints can not be replayed. Thus a compromised voiceprint is unusable for account access.
Anti reversing: A voiceprint is a hashed string of numbers and characters that represent how a specific individual’s voice rates on the myriad of characteristics being measured Also, it’s not possible to reverse engineer it to recover someone’s voice.
Proactive detection of known fraudsters: Each time a fraudster speaks within an IVR or to a contact center agent, the fraudster leaves his/her voiceprint in the same way that our fingers leave fingerprints when we touch an object. This enables an organization to create and store voiceprints of known fraudsters.
Non guessable: A voice is unique to the individual. It can’t be guessed unlike PINs or passwords.
Cost effective: The cost of implementation is low because there is no special hardware required. A simple telephone or microphone is all that a user needs to authenticate using her voice. Other methods of biometric authentication like fingerprinting and retinal scans require special devices.
Ease of usability: Most important to the future of voice biometrics is that it is the only biometric that allows users to authenticate remotely.
Quick enrollment: It is quick to enroll in a voice authentication system. The user is asked to speak a certain set of words or phrases, or to speak for a certain length of time.
Fast: Authentication is very fast; it can be completed in 0.5 seconds.
Less storage size: Another advantage is that the storage size of the voiceprint is small.

Cons:
Relatively low security: The biggest disadvantage is the replay attack. Hackers might attempt to gain unauthorized access to a voice authenticated system by playing back a pre-recorded voice sample from an authorized user. Need to implement proper anti-replay/ spoofing measures.

Low accurate: Person voice change, the difference in speaking instruments etc can affect the recognition. Compared to that other forms of biometrics such as retinal or fingerprint scans are more accurate and less prone to change.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Using an AirPcap device in Windows with Wireshark

Capturing wireless traffic in a Windows environment is unfortunately not as easy as a setting change. As with most Windows-based software, drivers in Windows are often not open source and do not allow for configuration change into monitor mode. With this in mind, we must use a specialized piece of hardware known as an AirPcap device. Once you have obtained an AirPcap device you will be required to install the software on the accompanying CD to your analysis computer. The configurable options include: • Interface - Select the device you are using for your capture here. Some advanced analysis scenarios may require you to use more than one AirPcap device to sniff simultaneously on multiple channels. • Blink LED - Clicking this button will make the LED lights on the AirPcap device blink. This is primarily used to identify the specific adapter you are using if you are using multiple AirPcap devices. • Channel - In this field, you select the channel you want AirPcap to listen on. Extension C...

Anti CSRF header

Recently I came across an application which was preventing crsf attacks using a unique non-traditional approach. In traditional approach the csrf is thwarted by embedding unique random tokens, called nonce, in each sensitive page. But this application, which was making ajax calls and used jQuery, was creating a header to identify the valid and invalid requests altogether. The idea is to generate a custom header, x-session-token in this case, with every request which is considered sensitive and includes any sort of transaction. For example: xhr.setRequestHeader('x-session-token', csrf_token)   At the server level, server checks for this header if found request is fulfilled, otherwise rejected. We need to use xhr calls for making use of this technique, not useful in regular POST and GET requests. Since, I was not aware of this kind of countermeasures, probably, since most of the applications I did were using standard requests. So, I searched a bit and found even Go...

Some one watching where you visited!

Yes... Mozilla has been susceptible to browser-history stealing java script code. Today, Giorgio posted some cool information about the exploit. Mozilla is already working on this. This bug has been reported. Actually they have set up a web site to show the proof-of-concept. Visit www.statrpanic.com in FF,Safari or Netscape and it will tell you which websites have you been already ! But I am not sure it will work in IE or not because my IE is not responding to the website. Clearing history of visited website makes you safe to this attack. I mean this is one way..may be there are other ways to exploit this. But I have found this effective. Try it yourself in FF and then in IE and see the results.