Beyond Fingerprinting: Is Biometrics the Best Bet for Fighting Identity Theft?

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Open Sesame: To enhance accuracy, security systems of the future are likely to assess multiple biometric traits.

Security systems based on anatomical and behavioral characteristics may offer the best defense against identity theft

By Anil K. Jain and Sharath Pankanti

• Biometric identification systems are harder to circumvent and easier to use than are traditional systems based on ID cards and passwords.
• Now that economical and powerful microprocessors are available, the technology is spreading.
• Before these biometric systems can reach their full potential, though, developers will have to lower their error rates.

If you are like many people, navigating the complexities of everyday life depends on an array of cards and passwords that confirm your identity. But lose a card, and your ATM will refuse to give you money. Forget a password, and your own computer may balk at your command. Allow your cards or passwords to fall into the wrong hands, and what were intended to be security measures can become the tools of fraud or identity theft. Biometrics—the automated recognition of people via distinctive anatomical and behavioral traits—has the potential to overcome many of these problems.

Compared with a physical token such as a bank card or with the knowledge of a secret such as a PIN, biometric traits are profoundly more difficult to forge, copy, share, misplace or guess. Indeed, they offer the only way of determining whether a person has been issued multiple official documents, such as a driver's license or passport, under different names. Yet they are quite easy to use as proof of identity. For these reasons, biometric systems have been gaining popularity in recent years. Laptops and mobile phones that can recognize a fingerprint, for instance, are now commercially available. In some countries biometric security is employed to safeguard items such as ATM cards and passports, to determine whether a person can rightfully enter a building or to ensure that someone is entitled to welfare payments. These systems are far from perfect. But with inexpensive sensors and powerful microprocessors now available, biometric technology is certain to become more pervasive.

Measures of Man

Biometrics is not a new idea. In 1879 Alphonse Bertillon, a French police inspector, proposed a complicated system of body measurements—arm and foot length among them—to identify repeat offenders. Over the next decade British scholars established that each print of a finger exhibits a unique pattern that persists over time, setting the stage for the development of the fingerprint classification system in 1896. Shortly thereafter, Scotland Yard began collecting fingerprints left at crime scenes to pinpoint criminals. And today almost every law-enforcement organization in the world relies on fingerprints to identify wrongdoers, solve crimes and conduct background checks on people applying for sensitive jobs.

But fingerprints are not the metric of choice for every purpose; several other physical and behavioral features have also been incorporated, singly or in tandem, into ID systems. The current emphasis in biometrics is to design fully automatic systems that are extremely fast, accurate, user-friendly and cost-effective and that can be embedded in existing security infrastructures. In addition to fingerprinting, workers in the past 30 years have developed ID systems based on such characteristics as the face, hand, voice and iris (the colored part of the eye).

Biometric systems require traits with two basic features: they must be unique for each person, and they must not change significantly with time. Some traits promote relatively high accuracy, others greater practicality or relatively low cost. The choice of trait to favor as an identifier therefore depends on the goals of the ID system. No single measurement is optimal for all applications.

Consider the three most popular traits in use today: the fingerprint, the face and the iris. In addition to its use in forensics, fingerprint recognition forms the basis of automated border-control systems in a number of countries. In the U.S. alone, the Department of Homeland Security's US-VISIT program has processed more than 75 million visitors since its debut in 2004. From a commercial standpoint, one of the biggest advantages of using fingerprints is that the sensors for capturing prints are now extremely cheap (around $5) and small enough to be embedded in consumer products such as laptops, mobile phones and even flash-memory sticks. But these compact sensors have higher error rates than their larger, more expensive counterparts common in law enforcement, because they scan a smaller portion of the finger and the image they record is lower in resolution.

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http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=beyond-fingerprinting

[pedroh 21]

what if I'm a replicant.. would that work on me?

[one...two...tree 2,762]

what if I'm a replicant.. would that work on me?

Hmmmm...You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down...Maybe you're fed up. Maybe you want to be by yourself. Who knows? You look down and see a tortoise, Leon. It's crawling toward you...

[pedroh 21]

hahhaa

OWNED

[one...two...tree 2,762]

hahhaa

OWNED

Leon: Let me tell you about my mother...

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Is this to be an empathy test? Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response...fluctuation of the pupil...involuntary dilation of the iris.

[Chica Yeyé 41]

hahhaa

OWNED

Leon: Let me tell you about my mother...

I didn't get it

[pedroh 21]

hahhaa

OWNED

Leon: Let me tell you about my mother...

I didn't get it

we're Blade Runner geekzorz

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

hahhaa

OWNED

Leon: Let me tell you about my mother...

I didn't get it

Its a movie quote.

Blade Runner. *real* and *synthetic* humans with no way to tell them apart except for a dubious personality test.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

hahhaa

OWNED

Leon: Let me tell you about my mother...

I didn't get it

Watch Bladerunner...this weekend! Rent it! One of the best sci-fi movies ever made.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

hahhaa

OWNED

Leon: Let me tell you about my mother...

I didn't get it

Watch Bladerunner...this weekend! Rent it! One of the best sci-fi movies ever made.

Buy the DVD set and watch all 5 different cuts

[pedroh 21]

no unicorn, with unicorn, no unicorn...

mhh great idea..

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Don't forget the voiceover.

I think the workprint version has some other differences as well...

[Chica Yeyé 41]

I saw Bladerunner a loooooooooooooong time ago ---- can't remember exact phrases but I agree, it was quite the movie. Maybe I will rent it.