IT Lecture Notes by Mark Kelly, McKinnon Secondary College
BIOMETRICS
Several features of people are unique to them. Fingerprints are the most common unique feature used to identify people. The pattern of the blood vessels in a person's retina, or the pattern of the iris are others. Automated face recognition is commonly used by police and security agencies to detect wanted people in crowds.
It is not too hard to map a person's fingerprints or retinal pattern and store the map in a database. When a person seeks authentication, their fingerprint or eye is scanned and mapped. The scan is compared to the genuine stored map in the database. It is impossible to forget your fingerprints or lose your retinal pattern.
And in case you're wondering it's not easy for villains to chop off your finger or pluck your eye out. A living finger has an electrical activity in it that can be detected. A dead eye loses the blood in its retinal blood vessels and the pattern is different to the eye when it was alive.
Combining biometric and password techniques (e.g. fingerprint scan as well as typing in a secret PIN number) is pretty well foolproof security.
Note that voice recognition or face recognition is not guaranteed to give 100% unique identification of individuals. Some folk are even experimenting with recognising the way a person walks!
Fingerprint recognition can be upset by injuries to the fingers.
Iris patterns, however, hardly ever change during a person's lifetime.
Biometrics
fighting terrorism and crime
Biometrics
in the school canteen (Wired News 10 Sep 03)
How biometric
fingerprint scanners work
Microsoft's
fingerprint scanner (15 Sep 04) and MS's
announcement
Just so you know what we're talking about on these biometrics pages
The retina at the back of the eye.
The pattern the blood vessels is unique in each individual.
The iris is the coloured part of the eye around the black pupil.
The patterns in the iris are also unique to each individual.
An iris scanner.
And no, the scanner can't blind you :-)
