With the emergence of online
banking and e-government processes, criminals are utilizing sophisticated
methods to counter established security measures. Organized crime is now
focusing on data theft, as evidenced in the eBay scam where thousands of credit
card details were compromised. This is where the current trends in cutting-edge
biometrics play an important role.
Traditional biometric technology
such as fingerprinting has few drawbacks. For instance, dummy fingers with
copied fingerprints can bypass a system easily. To overcome this, finger vein
recognition technology was developed. Here, a person is identified by the blood
vessel pattern below their skin – which is unique to every individual. The
method requires a person to scan their fingers using an infrared sensor and a
charge-coupled device that highlights the veins as dark lines and stores their
unique pattern in a back end database. Duplication in this method is impossible
as it requires the vascular pattern of a living person. The technology is being
considered for corporate banking customers, credit card authentication,
automated teller machines, automobile security and employee attendance tracking
in many countries.
Another biometric, facial
recognition is being used by the banking industry for its mobile banking
applications to authenticate transactions. 3D face recognition utilizes sensors
to identify distinctive characteristics of face shape, contours of the eye
sockets, chin, and nose. Even intelligence agencies and the US government are
in the process of building the world's largest database of face-recognition
data, to eventually identify every person in the country.
Along with face recognition
software, voice printing is gaining momentum with governments. Millions of
voiceprints are being stored to deal with kidnappings and other criminal
activities. Institutions are using frequency estimation, hidden Markov models,
pattern matching algorithms, neural networks and Gaussian mixture models to process
and store voice prints in a database. If a kidnapper demands ransom through a
phone call, he can be identified by making use of his voiceprint.
Some companies are performing
research to go one step ahead by authenticating heartbeats of people. A company
in Canada has developed a wearable wrist band that uses heartbeat
authentication for making payments. It can be worn around the wrist and checks
for a person's unique electrocardiograph, making false representation extremely
difficult.
Biometric authentication
eliminates the risk brought about by hacking and malware. It can provide the
security that passwords and other traditional authentication methods cannot and
hence create a secure environment.
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