I’ve always dreamed of having a biometric key to get into my house. Instead of having to fish around for a key when I got home, I could instead have a fingerprint or retina scan verify my identity and let me in. As cool as this might seem though, it appears that the more technology advances, the more difficult it is getting to lock things down.
Last year, Kryptonite had a huge PR nightmare on their hands when an uploaded video to the internet demonstrated just how easily it was to pick a Kryptonite lock using nothing more then a standard BIC pen. Earlier this week, someone uploaded a Mythbuster’s episode of how you can beat a biometric fingerprint scan by licking a Xeroxed copy of a fingerprint and now it is being reported that Diebold’s infamous voting machines have a significant weakness in that that keys used to secure the machines can be unlocked using a standard minibar key.
Given all of the negative press that we’ve seen on these voting machines, it’s no wonder that we still haven’t seen an orange Juice democracy emerge in the US. Given the huge amounts of money that these companies must spend trying to make their products hacker proof, it has to be more then just a little embarassing to find out that a little bit of geekery can go a long way to circumventing the protections. While it’s only a matter of time before these firms fix the issues associated with their locks, it does raise questions as to if your offline possesions may not be as secure as people like to think.
