Towards More Secure Biometric Readers for Effective Digital Forensic Investigation

This paper investigates the effect of common network attacks on the performance, and security of several biometric readers. Experiments are conducted using Denial of Service attacks (DoSs) and the ARP cache poisoning attack. The experiments show that the tested biometric readers are vulnerable to DoS attacks, and their recognition performance is significantly affected after launching the attacks. However, the experiments show that the tested biometric readers are secure from the ARP cache poisoning attack. This work demonstrates that biometric readers are easy targets for malicious network users, lack basic security mechanisms, and are vulnerable to common attacks. The confidentiality, and integrity of the log files in the biometric readers, could be compromised with such attacks. It then becomes important to study these attacks in order to find flags that could aid in a network forensic investigation of a biometric device.