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Home ยป Virtual U: Defeating Face Liveness Detection by Building Virtual Models from Your Public Photos
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Virtual U: Defeating Face Liveness Detection by Building Virtual Models from Your Public Photos

Authors: 

Yi Xu, True Price, Jan-Michael Frahm, and Fabian Monrose, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Abstract: 

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to bypass modern face authentication systems. More specifically, by leveraging a handful of pictures of the target user taken from social media, we show how to create realistic, textured, 3D facial models that undermine the security of widely used face authentication solutions. Our framework makes use of virtual reality (VR) systems, incorporating along the way the ability to perform animations (e.g., raising an eyebrow or smiling) of the facial model, in order to trick liveness detectors into believing that the 3D model is a real human face. The synthetic face of the user is displayed on the screen of the VR device, and as the device rotates and translates in the real world, the 3D face moves accordingly. To an observing face authentication system, the depth and motion cues of the display match what would be expected for a human face.

We argue that such VR-based spoofing attacks constitute a fundamentally new class of attacks that point to a serious weaknesses in camera-based authentication systems: Unless they incorporate other sources of verifiable data, systems relying on color image data and camera motion are prone to attacks via virtual realism. To demonstrate the practical nature of this threat, we conduct thorough experiments using an end-to-end implementation of our approach and show how it undermines the security of several face authentication solutions that include both motion-based and liveness detectors.

Yi Xu, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

True Price, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Jan-Michael Frahm, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Fabian Monrose, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {197225,
author = {Yi Xu and True Price and Jan-Michael Frahm and Fabian Monrose},
title = {Virtual U: Defeating Face Liveness Detection by Building Virtual Models from Your Public Photos},
booktitle = {25th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 16)},
year = {2016},
isbn = {978-1-931971-32-4},
address = {Austin, TX},
pages = {497--512},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity16/technical-sessions/presentation/xu},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug,
}
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