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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

Hi! I'm on the train with bad internet right now and so can't go looking but have you considered face recognition software using the laptops camera? There must be an app that takes a look at the webcam when a password challenge is presented.

Anyone know of anything?

Edit:

Found one! https://www.keylemon.com/download-other-versions/

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This is an excellent idea, and something I've tried but that particular application wouldn't recognise my face as I tend to lean to one side. But my leaning isn't reliable so it had had real trouble recognising me, not ideal if I'm trying to get into my computer :-)

Reliable facial recognition would be great though, just not managed to find it!

From what I've read a lot of them can be spoofed with either a printed picture, or a video playing back.

It's probably enough for stopping the casual interference the OP wants to prevent.

So I guess the next step in the arms-race would be twin cameras (kinect?) to build a 3D image of a face.

Then the bad guys would make a sculpture.

Then the good guys could add some kind of mannerism detection (smile?, wink?).

Then the bad guys would work on latex masks.

....I quite want to see how this evolves tbh.

It's only going to evolve so far for consumer application. At some point, the barrier to cracking becomes too high for normal efforts. Who's going to spend 4-6 hours applying makeup to their face to crack your laptop's security (since the crack only applies to one instance) if you're only protecting your weird porn and some household financial data. You likely wouldn't hear about any efforts beyond that, since it would be spycraft.

Cloning. The end-game is cloning.

Not really, because it could require a combo of physical attributes and information known by the subject.

Age accelerated face cloning and spying to get information and iris or other samples needed?

Totally off topic, but why don't laptops come with twin cameras already?!?!?

He said he's not looking for high level security. Just something basic to "keep honest people honest".

I've used KeyLemon before on my computer.

Removed it the day a friend of mine unlocked it with his face(he looks quite different).

Are their any technologies out there that can sense your body heat as well as facial recognition? I don't know if there are any commercially available applications of this but here's an interesting delve into evolving facial recognition into thermal recognition: http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/17173/InTech-Thermal_infrared...

Couldn't someone hold up a picture of the OP's face to the camera to bypass this?

I'm not sure if any desktop software does this, but (some?) Android devices can optionally require a blink to unlock with facial recognition.

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