Advantages and Disadvantages of using biometrics

Like any other technology biometric security also has its own advantages as well as disadvantages. The advantages and limitations of biometric security devices are mentioned below.

Advantages

Advantages of using biometric security systems are reliability and uniqueness of biometric identity, security and scalability. These advantages can be further described as follows.

1)Reliability and uniqueness

Biometrics provide unique identification as the system will based on identifying an individual using his/her own behavioral or physical characteristics. The unique characteristic used for authentication purposes in biometric security systems is also constant and permanent which in turn ensures that the biometric security system is reliable.

2)Security

As biometric is a unique characteristic to person and it is also secure since it can not be stolen or lost or shared or used by some other person. When compared with traditional security systems biometrics security systems are much more secure as they will grant access exactly to the specified individual. The system will verify whether the user trying to access is the exact person he/she claims to be. Because of this advantage high security areas are using biometric security systems.

3)Scalability

Multimodal biometrics increases scalability of a security system. When unimodal biometric databases are connected and being used by a biometric security system, user should provide all the biometrics requested by the system [1]. Therefore it becomes more and more accurate. Though one biometric of a fraud got matched to a template in the database the system will not provide access as the system is checking for other biometrics as well.

Disadvantages

Biometric security systems suffer from few demerits as any other technology. Biometrics are difficult to acquire. Biometrics systems are difficult to implement and the system may not get the required cooperation from the users. These disadvantages can be further described as follows.

1)Difficult to acquire

Biometrics systems capture the biometric to be processed using acquisition devices. Some features of the biometric are hard to acquire and they result in noisy data rather than the exact data about the biometric. For example in DNA identification acquiring DNA of a person is difficult task and the cost of acquisition is also high [1].

2)Difficult implementation

Implementing a biometric security system is huge process which involves in database management, pattern recognition, and biometric acquisition and so on. The task become more difficult in multimodal biometrics security system as the range of biometrics being used and the complexity of the system becomes high.

3)Cooperation unwillingness

Most of the biometric technologies need a user contact with the acquisition device. Most of the people dislike going through a scanning retina process in a retina recognition system. Such situations impact on the user acceptability of the system will not be accepted or used as planned.

4)Inconsistency

Biometrics are considered to be constant characteristics of a person through out his/her life time or a during a considerable time period. But biometrics becomes inconstant as they vary due to weather, illness, psychological characteristics and other environmental factors. The unexpected variations of biometric data will result exceptional results of the biometric security system.

References:-

[1] Drahansky M. and Orsag F., Biometric Security Systems: Robustness Of The Fingerprint And Speech Technologies, Brono University of Technology, Faculty of Information Technology, Department of Intelligent systems, 1-5