[17872] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: mother's maiden names...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Gutmann)
Thu Jul 14 09:45:23 2005
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
From: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
To: cryptography@metzdowd.com, perry@piermont.com
In-Reply-To: <87r7e2llir.fsf@snark.piermont.com>
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 18:36:53 +1200
"Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> writes:
>Why is it, then, that banks are not taking digital photographs of customers
>when they open their accounts so that the manager's computer can pop up a
>picture for him, which the bank has had in possession the entire time and
>which I could not have forged?
I don't know about photos specifically, but I know that signature imprints are
often still moved around by laborious manual means because the background
infrastructure to handle images doesn't exist. Most banks are still using
3270-style interfaces, even if they have a screen-scraped GUI front-end.
There simply isn't any provision for handling anything other than basic text
records - the data-centre back-ends are text-record based (and in some cases
the text is EBCDIC), the communications channels send and receive text records
(often at a few kbps over leased lines, X.25, or PSTN dialup), and the branch
software processes text records.
So using images (of any kind) isn't just a case of making an executive
decision to do so, it would involve a massive, end-to-end infrastructure
upgrade to implement.
Peter.
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