Ghost Attack: Using 19th-Century Illusions to Fool 21st-Century Biometrics
While the Pepper's Ghost illusion is a 19th-century optical technique, we found that this forgotten gimmick exposes vulnerabilities in modern face recognition systems. This paper introduces the 'Ghost Attack': a physical attack that repurposes this classic illusion using low-cost, free-space hardware and a transparent medium to project high-resolution facial data into physical 3D space. We show in the paper that despite relying on centuries-old optical principles, this new attack type simultaneously breaks three components of modern facial recognition systems (FRS): (a) the face matcher, (b) the presentation attack detection module, and (c) the morphing attack detection component, resulti...
| Authors | Tyler Fitzsimmons, Adam Czajka |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 16 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 October 2026 |
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