Well, it beats plastic surgery
From InfoWorld:
Biometric security systems have one particularly critical vulnerability: How do you replace your finger if a hacker figures out how to duplicate it? An IBM...research team working on that problem says it's recently cracked a major problem in the area of "cancelable biometrics."...
IBM's idea for navigating that obstacle is to construct a kind of technological screen separating a user's actual biological identification information from the records stored in profile databases. The company is developing software to transform biometric data such as fingerprints into distorted models that still preserve enough actual identification markers to make the distortion repeatable....
IBM's system wouldn't entirely solve the replaceability problem of biometrics: If a hacker got hold of a user's fingerprint and made a passable model, he could still wreak havoc with it. What IBM's technology could do, however, is significantly narrow hackers' opportunities to gain access to such data. If a user's fingerprints (or facial photographs, iris scans or any other biological marker) aren't stored in any of the systems she uses them to access, cracking those systems won't give the hacker keys to the victim's biometric kingdom. If a hacker did get in...IBM's system would let a user quickly cancel the compromised biometric profile and generate a new one, akin to replacing a lost or stolen credit card....
The concept is illustrated in a 2002 IBM web page, which shows how the same distortion techniques can be applied to a face. Distorted face 1 will have the same distortion as distorted face 2.
See an abstract for a Carnegie Mellon paper on the topic. SUNY Buffalo is also looking into this (they are also looking into the ethical, legal, and social implications of biometrics).
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