Malicious actors with unethical intentions are exploiting technological innovation for self-interests. Identity theft, a prevalent crime in today’s fast-paced world presents potential threats to national security, emphasizing identity verification solution providers to be vigilant and develop advanced systems to detect illegitimate entry.
Imposters have upgraded their nefarious way to gain unauthorized access into the digital world by leveraging face morphing, where a new identity is produced using two or more images.
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Understanding Facial Morphing Attack
Face morphing, a deceptive image manipulation technique that comes forth as a major threat vector, is employed by imposters to create highly realistic spoofed attacks or deep fakes that even bypass advanced authentication systems and easily intrude into financial systems.
It includes acquiring face images from multiple resources like ID documents or digital footprints and blending the resource images to generate a whole new identity, resembling the fed data.
German Federal Police recorded the first case of a facial morphing attack in 2013, where the fraudsters presented a morphed British e-passport. The morphed face was laid over the original image using over-lamination, making it hard to distinguish whether the passport was original or spoofed.
The vulnerabilities in ID verification and human expertise make it effortless for cybercriminals to get illegitimate access into systems leveraging morphing attacks.
Potential Risks Associated with Face Morphing Attack
Facial morphing attacks emerge as a serious threat to national security and leave victims with severe psycho-social consequences. Advanced and sophisticated AI algorithms and Adversarial Neural Networks (GANS) are employed to synthesize morphed attacks, which are a perfect blend of the resourced images. Technology has simplified it for imposters to fulfill their fraudulent activities and potentially evade ID verification systems.
Face morphing attacks are deemed as a gateway to fraudulent activities, with FOG passports leading the charge in this nefarious world, making it hard for biometric authentication to detect fabricated identities. FOG passports are real documents falsely issued to imposters and hard to distinguish them from genuine passports, greatly affecting public privacy.
- Prevalent use of facial morphing attacks erodes trust in the digital world, making it challenging to distinguish between real and fake identities, ultimately escalating misinformation.
- Facial morphing attacks are often used in social engineering attempts where vulnerable people are forced to believe that they are getting contacted by legitimate entities and required to provide sensitive information.
- The rising threats of morphing attacks question the effectiveness of biometric authentication systems, as imposters have discovered ways to evade ID verification solutions.
- Morphing attacks are often employed to get access to financial systems such as bank accounts to conduct potential transactions, fund transfers, or wire transfers.
- Apart from gaining unauthorized access to online services and privileges, facial morphing attacks also present far-reaching effects on the victims and damage their reputational image.
Why Morphing Attack Detection is Difficult?
Facial morphing attacks are arduous to recognize, as the boundary between real and fake identities is blended in such a perfect way even advanced authentication fails to spot the difference. The strategies implemented to create sophisticated morphed attacks are carried out in a series of steps to produce sharp outputs.
Human expertise which can distinguish between real and fake, even fails to detect the boundary line. The source images from different resources are efficiently deformed and blended perfectly by discovering the resemblance points. The facial features from source images are effectively extracted and multiple morphing techniques are leveraged to generate highly-authentic identities.
Above all the current authentication systems aren’t advanced enough to discern between real and fabricated IDs, as imposters use highly advanced techniques to assist their nefarious tactics. In addition, biometric verification tools are trained on very limited databases, finding it challenging to spot manipulative IDs.
Biometric authentication integrated liveness detection & biometric matching accuracy could facilitate the timely detection of spoofed attacks, safeguarding national security and preserving the public’s sensitive information.
Possible Ways to Prevent Morphing Attacks
To effectively combat the evolving threats of morphing attacks, it’s crucial to stay alert and implement advanced preventive strategies against this evil. Individuals are advised to confirm the legitimacy of the source before sharing sensitive information and trusting any piece of information.
Additionally, online service users are suggested to introduce advanced security features to their digital accounts and keep the accounts private to minimize illegitimate access.
Businesses and online digital platforms are mandated to develop advanced biometric authentication processes blended with sophisticated algorithms and tools trained on large datasets of identities to accurately authenticate individuals. Liveness detection efficiently confirms the authenticity of an individual by finding out that the claimed identity is live and not a static or spoofed image.
By analyzing three-dimensional facial features and skin texture analysis, biometric authentication systems can accurately verify the identity of a genuine individual, warding off morphed attacks.
Performing depth analysis and recognizing two-dimensional spoofed images could facilitate advanced facial recognition systems to precisely authenticate individuals. Complying with NIST standards against face morphing attacks can assist ID verification solutions to effectively fight the prevalent threats of morphed attacks.