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

Biometric Security

Identifying individuals in an accurate manner is one of the main problem most of the organizations are facing today. Currently existing traditional security systems use a knowledge based or a token based mechanism to identify individuals. The crucial disadvantages of such systems are that the token or the security information might go to frauds hands and it might get lost or forgotten. Such systems are unable to identify a fraud using the security information (PIN) or the token. To avoid such fraud access, organizations tend to implement automated identification systems where biometrics identification plays a major role. Biometrics is being used to automate the identification of people by one or more of their behavioral or physical characteristics. Biometrics cannot be stolen as traditional PIN, passwords or tokens and biometrics systems deny fraud access determining whether the user is the intended authorized person.

Personal identification can be defined as the process of associating a particular individual with an identity [2]. Identification can be divided in to two operation forms; verification and recognition [2]. For a security system to become effective both user and the technology should function properly. Before a decision is taken in design, develop and implement biometric security system the technology, a detailed cost-benefit analysis and a trade off analysis should be considered [3]. Several features are considered when it comes to selecting a biometric for a certain system. A universal, unique, permanent and non distributable characteristic is best suited as a biometric [2, 4]. Number of other factors such as performance and acceptability should also be considered. A Biometric trait is more reliable, tightly bounded and less in cost than traditional security tokens.

A biometric system consists of two modules; enrollment module and identification module [2, 1]. Both modules deal with pattern recognition. During enrollment biometric sensors are used to get a digital representation of the certain bio metrics and it is further processed via a feature extractor to generate a more compact and expensive template to be stored in the database [2]. The same process for a user biometric will be done in the identification and a feature matcher is used to find a matching template in the database. If a match is found the access will be granted and if not the access to the system will be denied.

Most popular biometric technologies that have been used in access control, criminal identification, and border security are facial recognition, fingerprint recognition, hand geometry, iris recognition, retina recognition, signature recognition, and speaker recognition. A wide range of security applications have been implemented and being used. For example USA nuclear plants are using biometric hand geometry recognition to prevent authorized access to the high security area [3]. Facial recognition can be used to monitor or identify individuals even there is a large number of people on the company, clubs or in public gatherings. Some systems pick out faces in a crowd and compare them to a stored database.

The new trend in biometrics is developing multi modal biometric system which will take more than one biometric to authenticate an individual. Multi modal biometric systems are more reliable and they have a low response time. US Department of Defence Common Access Card is a multimodal biometric system [3].

Biometric security systems have various issues which are considered in ongoing researches. Biometric security will be further advanced by having multimodal biometric systems, video recognition systems as well as biometric being used for other applications such as health.


References

[1] Jain A.K. and Ross A. (2004), MultiBiometric Systems, Communications of the ACM, 47(1), 34-40

[2] Jain A.K., Hong L. and Pankanti S. (2000), Biometric Identification, Communications of the ACM, 43(2), 91-98

[3] Rhodes K.A. (2003), Information Security challenges in using biometrics, United States General Accounting Office, 1-27

[4] Tsun-Li C., The Role of Biometrics in Virtual Communities and Digital Governments
http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~ctli/papers/Chapter6.pdf