On Investigating the Effectiveness of Biometric Readers in Thwarting Network Attacks: A Secure Architecture Design Proposal

Biometrics readers are deployed in many public sites and are used for user identification and verification. Nowadays, most biometrics readers can be connected to local area networks, and consequently, they are potential targets for network attacks. This article investigates the robustness of several fingerprint and iris readers against common denial of service (DoS) attacks. This investigation has been conducted using a set of laboratory experiments and DoS attack generator tools. The experiments show clearly that the tested biometric readers are very vulnerable to common DoS attacks, and their recognition performances deteriorate significantly once they are under DoS attacks. Finally, the article lists some security consideration that should be taken into consideration when designing secure biometrics readers.