- Email: [email protected]
Why you are identifiable after just a few steps
TECHNOLOGY Insight Electronic voting fred prouser/reuters/Corbis
Walk this way, your step is a dead giveaway
Call up the vote An app for voting might raise turnout, but only if it’s secure VOTERS in the US often struggle to time taken by making adjustments to make it to the polls to elect a president. their app. The team will present the In 2004, just over 60 per cent of work this week at the annual meeting eligible voters cast a ballot, but this of the Human Factors and Ergonomics was the highest turnout since 1968. In Society in Las Vegas, Nevada. 2008, an “energised” populace topped Existing electronic voting systems that, and installed Barack Obama in the have been slow to catch on. They were White House. Even then, that involved only used in about one third of ballots just 62 per cent of voters. cast in the 2010 US federal midterm How can more Americans – and elections, despite having been citizens of other democracies – be available for several election cycles. convinced to vote? Smartphones and This is in part due to lingering security tablet computers may help. Bryan Campbell and his team at Rice “At the moment, you University in Houston, Texas, designed can’t be sure your Angry Birds application isn’t an iPhone app for casting votes. They changing your vote” then asked 55 people aged between 18 and 69, with and without smartphone experience, to vote using issues, and it is likely that such either the app or via conventional problems will only be amplified if electronic and paper systems. voting goes mobile. All users typically took 90 seconds “Today’s mobile devices are on a longer to cast their vote on the platform that is much more insecure smartphone system. However, the than the PC you have at home. There is app did seem to reduce the number no separation of applications,” says Avi of mistakes made in voting, at least Rubin of the Johns Hopkins University among people familiar with Information Security Institute in smartphones. This group was more Baltimore, Maryland. Malware accurate when selecting the candidate embedded in other apps could easily of their choice using the app than on a invade voting software, he says. conventional system. The researchers “You can’t be sure your Angry Birds think they will be able to reduce the application isn’t changing your vote.” 28 | NewScientist | 24 September 2011
The US government wants to see voting practices improve. The 2000 presidential election was decided by a close result in Florida, but voting records there became mired in controversy. After this debacle, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, a law that many have interpreted as designed to bring voting practices into the 21st century. “Some form of internet voting seems inevitable and it follows that smartphones and other internetcapable mobile technologies will play a role,” says Campbell. Campbell and his colleagues say they are aware of the security issues, and expect they will be addressed in the coming months and years. An app might not lead to a sudden rise in voter turnout, though, even among young people. They tend to be more electronically savvy, but young people are often apathetic towards politics, says Michael McDonald of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and the United States Elections Project. The ballot itself is just one step, he says. People still have to register to vote and download the app. Easy as it may be, in order to do all of that, “you have to care”, he says. Joel Shurkin n
AIRPORT security may soon have a new way to check your ID: watching the way you walk. It seems footsteps are as unique as fingerprints, and can identify people with 99.8 per cent accuracy. “For the first time, our results show that it probably is possible to use this in a real-world security application,” says Todd Pataky of Shinshu University in Nagano, Japan. Earlier studies that showed it was possible to capture a person’s unique walk tended to look at only 10 people each, making it difficult to tell how well the methods would work in the real world. So Pataky and colleagues asked 104 people to walk across a half-metre-long board studded with thousands of pressure sensors, recording 10 steps per person. The sensors recorded how each foot applied pressure to the ground, and how that pressure distribution changed as the person walked. The information collected was used to train an algorithm to pick out the patterns in people’s steps. Of the 1040 steps recorded, the algorithm wrongly identified only three – a 99.8 per cent success rate (Journal of the Royal Society Interface, DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2011.0430). “Even if they have the same foot size, even if they have the same shape, [people] load their feet differently, and they do it consistently,” Pataky says. Similar sensors, which are available for about $20,000, could be used in airports to identify passengers as they walk barefoot through security. Christopher Nester of the University of Salford in the UK thinks the technique could be used as a diagnostic tool for foot diseases and orthotics. As for security applications, he sees a drawback: “Nobody minds putting their fingertip on a glass surface, which is clean. But we very rarely wash our feet.” Lisa Grossman n n
Walk this way, your step is a dead giveaway
Call up the vote An app for voting might raise turnout, but only if it’s secure VOTERS in the US often struggle to time taken by making adjustments to make it to the polls to elect a president. their app. The team will present the In 2004, just over 60 per cent of work this week at the annual meeting eligible voters cast a ballot, but this of the Human Factors and Ergonomics was the highest turnout since 1968. In Society in Las Vegas, Nevada. 2008, an “energised” populace topped Existing electronic voting systems that, and installed Barack Obama in the have been slow to catch on. They were White House. Even then, that involved only used in about one third of ballots just 62 per cent of voters. cast in the 2010 US federal midterm How can more Americans – and elections, despite having been citizens of other democracies – be available for several election cycles. convinced to vote? Smartphones and This is in part due to lingering security tablet computers may help. Bryan Campbell and his team at Rice “At the moment, you University in Houston, Texas, designed can’t be sure your Angry Birds application isn’t an iPhone app for casting votes. They changing your vote” then asked 55 people aged between 18 and 69, with and without smartphone experience, to vote using issues, and it is likely that such either the app or via conventional problems will only be amplified if electronic and paper systems. voting goes mobile. All users typically took 90 seconds “Today’s mobile devices are on a longer to cast their vote on the platform that is much more insecure smartphone system. However, the than the PC you have at home. There is app did seem to reduce the number no separation of applications,” says Avi of mistakes made in voting, at least Rubin of the Johns Hopkins University among people familiar with Information Security Institute in smartphones. This group was more Baltimore, Maryland. Malware accurate when selecting the candidate embedded in other apps could easily of their choice using the app than on a invade voting software, he says. conventional system. The researchers “You can’t be sure your Angry Birds think they will be able to reduce the application isn’t changing your vote.” 28 | NewScientist | 24 September 2011
The US government wants to see voting practices improve. The 2000 presidential election was decided by a close result in Florida, but voting records there became mired in controversy. After this debacle, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, a law that many have interpreted as designed to bring voting practices into the 21st century. “Some form of internet voting seems inevitable and it follows that smartphones and other internetcapable mobile technologies will play a role,” says Campbell. Campbell and his colleagues say they are aware of the security issues, and expect they will be addressed in the coming months and years. An app might not lead to a sudden rise in voter turnout, though, even among young people. They tend to be more electronically savvy, but young people are often apathetic towards politics, says Michael McDonald of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and the United States Elections Project. The ballot itself is just one step, he says. People still have to register to vote and download the app. Easy as it may be, in order to do all of that, “you have to care”, he says. Joel Shurkin n
AIRPORT security may soon have a new way to check your ID: watching the way you walk. It seems footsteps are as unique as fingerprints, and can identify people with 99.8 per cent accuracy. “For the first time, our results show that it probably is possible to use this in a real-world security application,” says Todd Pataky of Shinshu University in Nagano, Japan. Earlier studies that showed it was possible to capture a person’s unique walk tended to look at only 10 people each, making it difficult to tell how well the methods would work in the real world. So Pataky and colleagues asked 104 people to walk across a half-metre-long board studded with thousands of pressure sensors, recording 10 steps per person. The sensors recorded how each foot applied pressure to the ground, and how that pressure distribution changed as the person walked. The information collected was used to train an algorithm to pick out the patterns in people’s steps. Of the 1040 steps recorded, the algorithm wrongly identified only three – a 99.8 per cent success rate (Journal of the Royal Society Interface, DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2011.0430). “Even if they have the same foot size, even if they have the same shape, [people] load their feet differently, and they do it consistently,” Pataky says. Similar sensors, which are available for about $20,000, could be used in airports to identify passengers as they walk barefoot through security. Christopher Nester of the University of Salford in the UK thinks the technique could be used as a diagnostic tool for foot diseases and orthotics. As for security applications, he sees a drawback: “Nobody minds putting their fingertip on a glass surface, which is clean. But we very rarely wash our feet.” Lisa Grossman n n