This t-shirt can trick the automatic number plate reading system

In the future, where everything is monitored by computer vision algorithms, even patterns on our clothes can be used to fool those systems.

Digital security specialist and fashion designer Kate Rose not only designed patterns on fabric. She also sought to "disrupt" the database collected by automatic number plate reading systems by creating t-shirts filled with images of fake number plates .

If you've ever received a ticket in your inbox - sometimes with a photo of your car with yourself and the other passengers on the bus in the front row - there's the possibility of a car You have encountered an automatic number reading system (Automatic License Plate Reader, abbreviated as ALPR).

Like many monitoring technologies deployed in US cities, ALPR is present everywhere, operating 24/7, always in a state ready to summarize all cars passing by it. They are mounted on many things, from public phone stations to police cars, but they are not just regular speed cameras. ALPR are privately owned systems capable of capturing everything with a car-like shape present in their field of view, and often every minute they can collect up to 1,000 images. license plate. In the process of driving, or riding someone's car, such systems will read the license plate number and collect GPS location data with its registration information, as well as the date and time it passes by. .

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ALPR is not merely a technology used to resolve criminal cases as described by law enforcement agencies and manufacturers; they are also highly detailed surveillance systems, allowing police to track people when they come and leave sensitive locations like detox centers and immigration clinics.

The system will cut a part of the captured image and run it through a database to compare with training data set of license plate models.

But even though these technologies are extremely advanced, they are easily fooled by patterns and images that look like real car license plates. " When an ALPR looks around, it looks for something in a rectangular view or contains a sequence of characters with content indicating it is a number plate," Rose said. The system will cut a part of the captured image and run it through a database to compare with training data set of license plate models. If the system determines that it is a number plate, it will use the optical character recognition (OCR) function to read, record, and save the number plate, along with the GPS location where the sea is captured. number and time taken.

Rose's t-shirt design may interfere with this process. She developed and tested repeated motifs on her clothes so that they looked like a real number plate as possible, so that the ALPR system was fooled and saved the image of it as a number plate. real. " By wearing these designer clothes on the road, you will 'contribute' to putting garbage data into surveillance systems, on a large scale that will make it less useful, and the cost of use becomes. I think it's more important to test methods that bypass monitoring systems in every way, and I like to use clothes as the first thing to try. "

Rose presented her results in a talk at the DEF CON this year - an annual hacking workshop in Las Vegas. This year, the number of women participating in the DEF CON increased by 10% compared to last year, and there are quite a lot of seminars, presentations, meetings taking place with only women or 3rd gender. - although the idea is that women in DEF CON are still loitering somewhere.

" Hacking is basically democratizing and clarifying the systems and devices we are using, helping each other know that we are smart enough to analyze and play with them, and re-apply them. follow what you think is a good idea, " she said.