The TABULA RASA project will address some of the issues of direct (spoofing) attacks to trusted biometric systems. This is an issue that needs to be addressed urgently because it has recently been shown that conventional biometric techniques, such as fingerprints and face, are vulnerable to direct (spoof) attacks.

Direct attacks are performed by falsifying the biometric trait and then presenting this falsified information to the biometric system, one such example is to fool a fingerprint system by copying the fingerprint of another person and creating an artificial or gummy finger which can then be presented to the biometric system to falsely gain access. This issue effects not only companies in the high security field but also emerging small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) that wish to sell biometric technologies in emerging fields.