Do you use a fingerprint scanner to enter your office? Have you undergone a face-scanning mechanism before dropping your luggage at the airport? If yes, you have experienced the use of biometrics in your daily life – it’s no more a part of science fiction.
In this blog, we’ll explore the basics, types, and the challenges associated with using biometrics, and more.
Let’s begin.
What are Biometrics?
Biometrics form a system that uses physical or behavioral attributes to develop authentication systems. For example, certain government IDs use fingerprints and iris scans as authentication attributes. Some organizations also use facial or voice recognition systems to identify it’s employees or users. Since each individual’s physical and behavioral characteristics are different, it is easy to use as a security mechanism.
What Are the Different Types of Biometrics?
Biometrics are of two types: behavioral and physical. Let’s understand each of these biometrics in detail.
Based on Physical Characteristics
In this type of biometrics, we take into account the physical characteristics of an individual.
- Use of Signatures: Signature is common biometrics in the financial and business domain. Be it an e-signature or physical signature; it is proof that the transacting party is ready to honor the agreement.
- Fingerprints and Physical Scanning: Here, your fingerprints, retina scans, face recognition, and more are used as physical authentication features. For example, you might have seen the fingerprint passwords in most of the mobiles. Your fingerprints are stored in the phone memory. Unless you use your fingerprints, you cannot open your phone. Since fingerprints are unique for each individual, the phone is secured.
- Voice-Based Identification: Voice identification systems are primarily used in virtual assistant technologies. For example, Amazon’s Alexa responds to your voice commands to perform specific functionalities.
- Use of DNA: DNA fingerprinting or DNA analysis is convenient, especially in the criminology field. No two suspects can end up having the same type of DNA profile.
Based on Behavioral Patterns
An individual has behavioral patterns that can be used for authentication, like typing patterns or engagement mode.
- Biometrics based on typing pattern: Every individual has a different manner of typing. The speed varies, the navigation between keys is unique, and the force applied on the key is different for an individual.
- Mode of a person’s engagement and navigation: Here, we are going in-depth and analyzing how a person holds a mouse or how frequently they hold a device to authenticate an individual’s identity.
What Are the Risks Associated with Biometrics?
While there are many advantages of biometrics, like using unique identification details of an individual, there are also some concerns regarding biometrics.
First, what if an individual’s voice becomes hoarse due to an illness? Or, a person comes out with a new haircut. Will the biometric system be able to authenticate the person with these changes? Maybe, not. We still need more work on this front.
Also, security and data privacy is a significant issue with biometrics. What if there is a data breach and the unique identification details of individuals are leaked? We need to protect these details.
Want to protect your business data? If so, MyTek can help you.
You may contact us or reach out to us at 623-312-2440.