Reality Defender red team enrolls fake faces in Google’s biometric account protection

Biometric liveness checks do not effectively protect Google’s selfie biometrics via video for account enrollment, log-in and recovery against synthetic identities, according to a red team assessment by Reality Defender.Google says its new feature, launched near the end of July, includes active liveness detection to protect against spoof attacks using fake photos or videos and anti-deepfake protections. It is still in the process of rolling out.The brief announcement referred to “multiple layers of security to help prevent impersonation attempts” and “standard security practices to detect and help prevent suspicious sign-in attempts.”A post by Reality Defender AI Researcher and Red Team Specialist Dharva Khambholia explains how a team member used synthetic faces with an eligible Google account owned by Reality Defender.Two enrollments were attempted by a Reality Defender employee using commercially available software for real-time face-swapping and camera manipulation techniques.