Biometrics – The promise versus the practice
Nathan Clarke, Steven Furnell · Computer Fraud & Security · 2005
The term biometrics has been hard to escape recently, with numerous articles being published discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the technology 1 , 2 . Much of this discussion has come about due to the level of research and interest shown in large scale implementations of the technology by the US and UK Governments 3 , 4 and European Union. 5 However, few articles to date have discussed the fundamental operation of biometrics and the subsequent issues that arise when developing a biometric technique. This article focuses upon describing the biometric process from a lower level of abstraction, and introduces a number of design features that play an inherent role in the security provided by a biometric approach.