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An ATM with an eye
The rise of technology has brought into force many types of equipment that
aim at more customer satisfaction. ATM is one such machine which made
money transactions easy for customers to bank. The other side of this
improvement is the enhancement of the culprit's probability to get his
'unauthentic' share. Traditionally, security is handled by requiring the
combination of a physical access card and a PIN or other password in order
to access a customer's account. This model invites fraudulent attempts
through stolen cards, badly-chosen or automatically assigned PINs, cards
with little or no encryption schemes, employees with access to
non-encrypted customer account information and other points of failure.
Our paper proposes an automatic teller machine security model that would
combine a physical access card, a PIN, and electronic facial recognition.
By forcing the ATM to match a live image of a customer's face with an
image stored in a bank database that is associated with the account
number, the damage to be caused by stolen cards and PINs is effectively
neutralized. Only when the PIN matches the account and the live image and
stored image match would a user be considered fully verified.
The main issues faced in developing such a model are keeping the time
elapsed in the verification process to a negligible amount, allowing for
an appropriate level of variation in a customer's face when compared to
the database image, and that credit cards which can be used at ATMs to
withdraw funds are generally issued by institutions that do not have
in-person contact with the customer, and hence no opportunity to acquire a
photo.
Because the system would only attempt to match two (and later, a few)
discrete images, searching through a large database of possible matching
candidates would be unnecessary. The process would effectively become an
exercise in pattern matching, which would not require a great deal of
time. With appropriate lighting and robust learning software, slight
variations could be accounted for in most cases. Further, a positive
visual match would cause the live image to be stored in the database so
that future transactions would have a broader base from which to compare
if the original account image fails to provide a match - thereby
decreasing false negatives.
When a match is made with the PIN but not the images, the bank could limit
transactions in a manner agreed upon by the customer when the account was
opened, and could store the image of the user for later examination by
bank officials. In regards to bank employees gaining access to customer
PINs for use in fraudulent transactions, this system would likewise reduce
that threat to exposure to the low limit imposed by the bank and agreed to
by the customer on visually unverifiable transactions.
In the case of credit card use at ATMs, such a verification system would
not currently be feasible without creating an overhaul for the entire
credit card issuing industry, but it is possible that positive results
(read: significant fraud reduction) achieved by this system might motivate
such an overhaul.
The last consideration is that consumers may be wary of the privacy
concerns raised by maintaining images of customers in a bank database,
encrypted or otherwise, due to possible hacking attempts or employee
misuse. However, one could argue that having the image compromised by a
third party would have far less dire consequences than the account
information itself. Furthermore, since nearly all ATMs videotape customers
engaging in transactions, it is no broad leap to realize that banks
already build an archive of their customer images, even if they are not
necessarily grouped with account information.
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