Member-only story
The Tools to Defeat Facial Recognition Are Free Online
It only takes two stickers to fool this popular face detector
Facial recognition software is far from perfect — research has shown that it’s plagued with racial bias, for example — and now researchers have identified a flaw with the robotic gaze.
Research from Huawei’s Moscow Research Center details one way to thwart a popular open-source algorithm used to detect whether there’s a face in an image or not, a crucial first step before the system matches that face against a database of known faces.
The Huawei paper shows how two stickers, each with a specific pattern that looks like a deformed QR code, can fool a face detection algorithm with 95% accuracy once they’re placed on a subject’s cheeks. If you’re savvy, you can fork the code and play with it yourself on GitHub.
The attack on the face detector turns the algorithm against itself — it only works because the researchers had access to the program they were trying to fool. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless. Many commonly…
