Biometrics hit the mainstream
Vance Bjorn · 2005
Biometric-based user authentication is no longer just the domain of James Bond movies or government installations. Fingerprint sensors, in particular, are now showing up standard on notebooks from IBM, HP and Toshiba, and in new line of peripherals from Microsoft. The benefits to the user and organization are clear: unlike passwords or tokens, fingerprints cannot be lost, forgotten, or easily lent to others. The consequence is a reduction in administration costs, improvement in audit logs for compliance, and the prospect of heightened security by reducing reliance on each user to adhere to security policy. However, the potential weaknesses are also well known, such as reversible templates, gummy fingers, storage of secrets, and central databases. Since no single security approach is a magic bullet, the strengths and weaknesses of biometric authentication must be considered in light of the threats in a given environment. This talk will survey the current state of the art of biometric authentication algorithms, readers and security architectures used for network security with a critical analysis of the security and privacy considerations.