3 main problems with biometric security

If you’re thinking of adding some physical security to your work facilities, you’ve probably come across quite a few options already, such as the well-established fingerprint and retina scanners. You would do well on being thorough on your research since the different brands and models are vast and even with today’s advanced technology, none of these come without their flukes and kinks.

Fingerprint readers remain the most common type of identifiers, partly because of their essential uniqueness and permanence, partly because law enforcement has kept fingerprints on file since before modern technologies were available.

Impersonation (think any spy movie where thumbs are cut off to get past a gate) is only one of the problems that come with some of the most common biometric methods.

Fingerprints are useful for a range of crime investigation, immigration, and heavy security projects; however, they do have some inherent challenges. One of the issues being partial fingerprints; the other is security and privacy and how likely it is that a fingerprint could be compromised in any given application (this is a problem because fingerprints don’t change much over time).

There’s been recent research that revolves around data collection and how to safeguard a reference template on data stored on a server with fuzzy extractors.

Because biometrics is such a rapidly advancing IT field, and because it offers so many potential applications, you can expect to see much more of this kind of new design in future years. With any luck, tomorrow’s devices and sign-ons will give us an easy biometric security feature to use. After all, there must be something between the password problems we face now, and the privacy issues posed by some biometric identification techniques.

Source: Techopedia