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Touting the technology as a replacement for IDs, part of your laptop's login, or able to let cops know if the person they just pulled over is dangerous, the first effective long-range iris scanner has been developed by Marios Savvides, a Carnegie Mellon engineering professor:
"Fingerprints, they require you to touch something. Iris, we can capture it at a distance, so we're making the whole user experience much less intrusive, much more comfortable," Savvides [said]. Unlike other scanners, which required someone to step up to a machine, his scanner can capture someone's iris and face as they walk by.
"There's no X-marks-the-spot. There's no place you have to stand. Anywhere between six and 12 meters, it will find you, it will zoom in and capture both irises and full face," he said.
Iris scanning currently works only at close range, so it requires a level of cooperation of the person being scanned:
"It requires a level of cooperation that makes it very overt—a person knows that you're taking a picture for this purpose,"...If it succeeds, long-distance scanning will change all that. Savvides says his team has secured a patent for his invention and will continue to work to make it easier and cheaper. He continues, too, to look for positive implementations of it.
Spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @10:15PM
> Please. You're arguing security through obscurity, except for inventions instead of software.
No he is not.
You are exhibiting a common misunderstanding of what "security through obscurity" actually means. The phrase was coined to refer to a system with a secret achilles heel - like a hardcoded password - that if discovered would render the security system ineffective.
It was never intended to refer to situations where security is increased by the inclusion or addition of layers of secrecy like port knocking or the lack of invasive technologies. All security is a matter of degree: how much money can the attacker afford to spend to overcome the money spent by the defender. Extra layers of secrecy increase the attacker's costs. The amount of increase may or may not be cost effective. But as long as the secrecy increases the attacker's costs it is not "security through obscurity."