Life Casting for Nefarious Purposes
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The physical security company I work for has a question about the effectiveness of 3D face recognition technology. It works by scanning the face with special cameras to measure not just height and width but also depth. It creates a database of points to describe each face it reads, and compares that with stored templates to find a reasonable match. It's pretty good at saying Bob's face is not Fred's face, but it's not so good at saying whether Bob is a mannequin or a real human. While testing, we successfully enrolled both a mannequin and a face mask, and then went on to have those two items validate, thus opening the door of our high security room (well, if we had actually attached it to such a door, which we didn't). This naturally brought up the following spy scenario: Charlie's Angels slip Mr. Big some rohypnol, then make a mold of his face while he is unconscious. He wakes up a few hours later thinking he simply passed out drunk, while they create a silicone face mask and gain access to all his company secrets. Sounds silly, but isn't this possible? Google doesn't want to tell me with any detail. I am hoping someone out there has information about the accuracy of such a face mold. Can you just get their major skin features, or can you even approximate large pores? How likely is it that you could take a cast while they were unconscious? Would being unconscious make your face deform slightly? As you might expect, the face reader manufacturer is not taking this inquiry seriously. But is that because it sounds so implausible, or because they know their product could be fooled?
Don't let my name fool you. That's my job.
As someone else said, why bother with drugging the person in question? A mask would take a while to set, so you'd have to keep the person out for a while. A pair of decent camera's at known positions can do a 3d scan, rapid prototype a head with a hole in the top, pour in hot coffee to fool the infra red. The best advantage of this is you can scan a lot of people walking by the cameras, then pick and chose your victim. Even the best facial system out there isn't worth much more than protecting a laptop. If you want high security biometrics, you'd have to go with retina scans. They're more difficult to steal and replicate. Couple that with personal pin numbers and you should be at the top of automated security.
The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.