Biometrics
When studying 31000years old cave wall painting of prehistoric humans, archeologist occasionally find a remarkable things-a human handprint. It is believed that these prints were left on the walls of caves to serve as the signature of the artist. This concept of using human traits for purposes of identification evolve into the modern field that is known as – BIOMETRICS.
First we have to understand the term biometrics means: (bio-life), (metrics-to measure).
Biometrics is the most helpful way of identifying and authenticating individuals in a reliable and fast way through the use of unique biological characteristic. It allows a person to be identify to and authenticated based on a set of recognizable and verifiable data, which are unique and specific to them like fingerprint,dna. Technological advances as well as new discoveries about the human body and behavioral patterns continue to expand the list of human traits that are useful for identification. For example, recent research has demonstrated that we can use ear prints, brainwaves, heartbeats, and DNA as basis for verifying identity. The data which are used for biometrics are of two types
1)Morphological
2)Biological
Morphological identifiers mainly consist of finger prints, the shape of the hand ,of the finger, vein pattern, the eye and the shape of the face. For our daily uses like for attendance, for mobile security we use Morphological identifiers.
Biological identifiers consist of DNA, blood saliva ,urine for use in medical and police forensic.
A biometric system is a system that allows the recognition of a certain characteristic of an individual using mathematical algorithms and biometric data. A typical biometric system has the following three components:
Enrollment. A biometric image is captured by a device (known as the “sensor”), preprocessed for feature extraction where features denote the identifying characteristics that are used in the identification process, and enrolled in the system.
Matching. The enrolled image is matched against the database of features extracted earlier from existing images, typically referred to as reference feature vectors.
Decision. A decision is made about whether the person is genuine or an impostor.
Now we will see some of the common biometric method; like finger print, eye scan.
FINGERPRINT-
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the odds of two people sharing the same fingerprints are one in 64,000,000,000. Fingerprints differ even for 10 fingers of the same person.
IRIS-
Despite the promising role of biometrics in ensuring security in different walks of the society today, there are several issues and challenges associated with the process of biometric authentication.
VOICEPRINT-
Speaker verification (based on the voiceprint biometric) consists of making a decision whether a given voice sample belongs to the individual in question or not. Applications of speaker verification include additional identity check during credit card payments over the Internet, automatic segmentation of teleconferences, and in the transcription of courtroom discussions .
Disadvantage of biometrics–
Despite the promising role of biometrics in ensuring security in different walks of the society today, there are several issues and challenges associated with the process of biometric authentication. There are various ways an individual can endeavor to bypass a biometric system and eventually attack the weakness spot of such a system. One of the main weaknesses in a biometric system is the fact that a person’s biometric data are often not hidden as a secret. Spoofing attacks generally refer to the process of fabricating biometric traits in order to bypass the biometric authentication process. Spoofing involves two stages: (a) the capture of a biometric “image” belonging to an enrolled user and (b) transferring the biometric image onto an artifact containing the biometric features required as proof of identity.
If biometric data are stolen, the privacy and security of the data owner are forever compromised. This is because, any biometric trait, such as iris, retina, or palm vein, generally remain the same throughout an individual’s entire life, and cannot be easily changed as in the case of a compromised password. Another essential issue in the biometrics field is focused on protecting privacy.
Despite the negative problems connected with their deployment, biometrics still can be utilized as an exceptionally efficient technique to protect one’s privacy. Assuming an individual’s biometrics data can only be obtained through a biometric matching procedure, the biometric data will be much more secure if the access was proceeded by a regular password. Similarly, the likelihood of a thief using a stolen card would be largely decreased if the use of the credit card must be verified with the authenticated fingerprint. Hence, these benefits have a tendency to overcome the worries over losing a level of one’s privacy by providing biometric information. In fact, today’s biometric systems do not store the user’s template in its original copy. Check the affiliate link.
As we can understand that biometrics is mainly for our benefit but there are some disadvantage like it costs too much, there can be chance of data leak and hacking. So we have to decide that very much dependency on biometrics is correct or not?
