Skip to main content

Bourne Incrimination - bio identity theft, the next big problem

It was only a matter of time before it became possible to create fake DNA evidence. That time is now.

DNA Evidence Can be Fabricated [New York Times]

Think it's bad when somebody steals your identity, drains your bank account, and spends thousands of dollars on credit cards they opened with your name on it? This run of the mill identity theft can cost you thousands of dollars, and many years to clean up. It pales in comparison to what will happen if biometric data becomes commonly used as proof of identity. Sometimes also called bio-print (like fingerprint) or bio-identity mechanisms, such things as retina scans and fingerprint scans are already in use, or even common use. DNA scans are likely to become possible several years from now, as the technology to read DNA is evolving rapidly. An entire genome can be sequenced by three people and equipment costing a few hundred thousand dollars, in a very short period of time, several days. When it become possible to read DNA in more or less real time, people will undoubtedly clamor to use it as an identity mechanism, for bank access, for voting, and who knows what else.

Even (or perhaps long, if you doubt that day is near) before that's possible, databases will be filled with your DNA sequences, because it will be valuable to you and your doctor. Unless we get unexpectedly better at protecting data, those databases will be protected by the same organizations, people, and technologies which today fail to protect your simple text based identity -- your name, date of birth, social security number, address, and phone number.

With current technology, you can engineer a crime scene. You can make it look like a specific, innocent person committed a homicide, for example. The technology required to do so remains expensive, but it's well within the reach of governments, and the capabilities of research labs.

If you're writing the next hollywood script for Jason Bourne or James Bond, keep your eye on this stuff. It's moving faster than Hollywood.

Comments

Mykenna Cepek said…
The movie "Minority Report" (2002) illustrates this quite well.

Popular posts from this blog

Verified by Visa (Veriphied Phishing?)

If you have used a Visa card to make a purchase online lately you may have encountered a relatively new program, Verified by Visa . I've encountered it twice. The system is an interesting attempt by Visa to reduce online fraud and identity theft. It's a noble effort, but the user experience is unsettling, and the security implications are not exactly crystal clear. Here's what happened to me, both times the Verified by Visa system was activated. I was redirected away from the domain at which I was shopping, to a URL which was: not the domain where I was shopping, not the domain of the bank that issued my card not visa.com I've been telling people for years that if anything like that happens to you, close your web browser immediately and do not under any circumstances enter any personal information into the form, because this is a sure sign of a man in the middle or phishing scam. (Never mind that all the best phishing scams now-a-days look like the actual dom

Splunk acquires Phantom Cyber

I hope it doesn't come across as too cynical, the observation that most acquisitions in the tech domain fail to produce anything useful and often as not wind up killing a promising upstart technology, even if only by accident. I have hope for this one, though. Splunk strikes me as a likely exception. This acquisition of fresh ideas and talent might breathe new life into a solid, if somewhat staid, security company. Splunk’s data analytics gets a security boost with $350 million acquisition of Phantom Cyber

Jailbreaking iOS is a Dead Man Walking

Rumor has it that Apple will include a new security feature (possibly known to the developers in Apple as "Rootless") in the upcoming releases iOS 9 and OS X 10.11. Although details are sparse, it looks like Apple may have implemented what other UNIX systems call "namespaces" (See this nice discussion of namespaces on Linux ). Most of the public speculation about the rumor concerns a possible end to jailbreaking , a sport which has fallen on hard times with successful jailbreaks coming fewer and farther between. Since the defects which enable jailbreaking are inherently open to malware, Apple's ongoing efforts to find and fix these bugs with the LLVM/Clang compiler's ever-more-diligent static analyzer make it harder for the jailbreak community to find a toehold. However, a namespaces-like security architecture might fix one of the biggest issues that leads people to desire a jailbroken iPhone. When iOS was created, the system extension features were