Biometrics: A new era in security

However, these security methods have important weaknesses—they can be lost, stolen, forged, or forgotten. Biometric technology would change security and access control by providing systems that recognize us by our biological or behavioral characteristics, such as fingerprints, iris patterns, facial characteristics , and speech patterns. A biometric security system uses one or more sensors (such as a camera or microphone) to acquire a sample of a physical or behavioral characteristic of someone who desires entry to a computer network, building, or other secure system. The biometric system then classifies the sample in some unique way and compares it to classifications for one or more authorized users in a database. Referring to biometric technology, Jackie Fenn, an analyst with the Gartner Group, a market research firm, said, " It is becoming more credible based on some real-world deployments. " In fact, Erik Bowman, an industry analyst with CardTech/SecurTech—which offers conferences, market research, and consulting services on smart-card and security technology—predicted the growing demand for network security will help increase the worldwide market for bio-metrics applications from $24 million in 1997 to $60 million in 1999. Past and projected sales figures are shown in Figure 1. The primary concerns about the technology are cost, accuracy, security, inter-operability, and intrusiveness on the people who are subject to biometric scanning. However, in the face of rapidly increasing demand for the technology, researchers and vendors are working on ways to address these concerns. In the late 1970s, security-conscious and technologically sophisticated organizations , such as the US Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense, began using electronic biomet-ric technology (like fingerprint-recognition systems) to guard access to such secure facilities as nuclear reactors. The technology Today, most biometric systems capture data about biological or behavioral characteristics via cameras or microphones and relay the data to a digital signal processor (DSP) for analysis, digitization, and processing. Most biometric systems conduct a verification process, in which they take processed data from a person claiming to be an authorized user and compare it to stored data for the actual user. Because this requires comparison to just one stored file, verification systems generally use a relatively simple database. On the other hand, biometric identification applications—which read a person's biological or behavioral characteristics and try to find a match from data stored for hundreds or even thousands of authorized users—can be quite complex. For example, identification applications require sophisticated databases and …