Mastercard, a world leader in credit cards, is looking to take advantage of selfies to help enrich your shopping experience. Credit card security is still one of the biggest problems facing the banking industry, but this new measure could help reduce fraud charges to a large extent, and give people a whole new excuse to take a selfie.
Mastercard, however, feels confident in the ability of their application being able to be used for more productive purposes. They are also considering using fingerprint and password recognition, but the company has learned from the problems faced by “Smart Unlock” on Android devices and chosen to improve upon it. Ken Munro, a security researcher at Pen Test Partners says:
“Mastercard will want this to be secure because they’re dealing with money. But there is a case for adding extra layers of security,” said Mr Munro. “If an ordinary password gets compromised you can simply revoke it or change it. What happens if your facial recognition data gets stolen? You can’t change your face.”
Mastercard is in hopes of combining the checkout / payment process by making the end user submit a selfie at the time of checkout, along with a pin code. Each security measure is not without its security flaws but combined, they go hand in hand.
“Ideally I’d like to see facial recognition used in conjunction with a Pin. Both systems have flaws, but work brilliantly when you combine them.”
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Seeing how there is only a handful of smartphones that offer fingerprint sensors, Facial Recognition is definitely the best avenue for this. Most modern phones offer some top quality front camera in even budget price ranges.
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Source: BBC
