Security Hardening of Facial Recognition Systems

The usage of face recognition-based smart locks is growing daily in securing restricted physical locations, and although they provide an elegant and easily manageable access control solution, they might be subjected to various attacks such as with pre-recorded videos, 3D printed faces, and even with plainly printed static images of the authorized user. The main focus of this paper is to develop an additional security layer of a smart lock mechanism that would remedy such vulnerabilities and harden the facial recognition-based access control system. The implemented smart lock will use an IP camera near the protected door, and the facial recognition will be performed by an artificial intelligence algorithm running in the background of the Linux-based hardware. The smart lock system will be based on the affordable technology with limited processing power in mind. The security hardening will be based on the eye blink and liveness detection. Such hardened algorithm will prove to be more difficult to deceive, and at the actuator level will control the lock via relay mechanism in order to open the doors for authorized persons.