IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2016 - 66

how important our phones are to us and how much of
our lives are entangled with these devices. And yes, they
love this because it makes you a loyal customer - as
long as they treat you with respect.
Enter biometrics which are easier to use than a PIN
number and more reliable to authenticate the end user
(their customer). After all, while someone else can learn
your PIN and use it to access your device, this is not
quite as straightforward when biometrics are used. This
is particularly the case if the acquisition and analysis of
the biometric happens on the phone itself.
But the really important part is that the biometrics
used to authenticate you never have to leave your
device. That eliminates the central database that can be
targeted by cyber-criminals.
If we extrapolate a few years into the future, nobody
needs a credit card - you can use a biometric-based
access code paired with your credit account. That
means no databases of customer credentials that can be
stolen. Yes, there is a database of ZKP enrollment keys
identifying customers, but if you transmit those keys
from different phones, or with a different biometric, then
you won't be able to answer the ZKP challenges from the
transaction server. The value of such a database is close
to zero, because of the level of effort required to exploit
even a single enrollment key.
The end of online credit-card fraud as we know it?
And if your smartphone + your biometric become
accepted to verify your identity for financial transactions,
why not build on that to make it a legal instrument as
well? Electronic documents could be signed with your
enrollment key which would require your phone + biometric in combination to verify contractual agreement.
Of course there is a flip side to every story. This does
require that we trust the phone manufacturers to keep
our biometric data secure inside the device. We must
trust in their algorithms and in the security of the transaction infrastructure implemented on their servers. And
that they will provide robust mechanisms to backup,
secure, and transition the enrollment keys generated on
one device to a new replacement.
Yes, you can take back ownership of your biometrics
and how they are used, but the trade-off is that you
must trust the device manufacturer and their extended
security ecosystem.
But eventually you will have to trust someone. And
as I write this, who is taking on the U.S. Government in
public court to fight for the right to a secure device?
That is something that would not have happened even
ten years ago - but then again the modern smartphone
isn't even ten years old!
To conclude, let us consider the growing societal challenges posed to personal security and privacy through
our networked techno-culture. This has shifted many of

66

the ethical and culture norms that we have grown familiar with as a society, and in a relatively short time span.
Ironically the smart phone, which lies at the nexus of
our techno-cultural evolution - and is increasingly the
most disruptive component of this new knowledge society, has also brought the focus back onto the individual.
It has done this by gathering many elements of our personal lives and laid these open for sharing and dissemination. And ultimately, these devices may return control
to the individual citizen, offering appropriate solutions to
manage and safeguard our personal security and privacy.

Author Information
The authors are with the C3 Imaging Centre, College of
Engineering & Informatics, National University of Ireland
Galway, Ireland. Email: dr.peter.corcoran@ieee.org and
claudia.iancucostache@nuigalway.ie.

Acknowledgment
This research is funded under the SFI Strategic Partnership
Program by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and FotoNation Ltd. Project ID: 13/SPP/I2868 on Next Generation
Imaging for Smartphone and Embedded Platforms.

References

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