Biometric Codes And Biometric Identification

Biometrics technology aims at utilizing major and distinctive characteristics such as behavioral or biological, for the sake of positively indentifying people. With the help of a combination of hardware and specific identifying sets of rules, a basic human attribute, automated biometric recognition mimics to distinguish and categorize other people as individual and unique. But the challenges surrounding biometrics are great as well.

The thing with biometrics is that it works great only if the verifier can verify two things: Firstly, that the biometric to be used has come from the intended person at the time of verification, and Secondly, which the biometric should match with the master biometric entry in the file database. If the system can't do that, it can't work. Biometrics are good in uniquely identifying the people, butat the same time they are not secrets and cannot be trusted [1].

During the identification phase, the user puts the finger on the same sensor, generating a new fingerprint image or template called query print. Minutiae points are carried out from the query print, and the matcher module compares the set of query minutia with the stored minutia templates or image in the enrollment database to find the number of similar minutia points. Because of variations present in finger placement and pressure applied to the sensor, the minutia points take out from the template and query fingerprints must be lined up, or submitted before matching. After line up the fingerprints, the matcher decides the number of pairs of matching minutiae-two minutiae points that have similar location and directions. The system decides the user's identity by comparing the match score to a

Biometrics are important to not only information systems, but to information security as a subject. Today, most information is kept secure via ID cards or secret information, such as a PIN, password, pattern, etc., the downside to this type of security is the lack of a failsafe (Ashok, Shivashankar and Mudiraj)! What would happen if an ID card was lost? Or a PIN, password or pattern was leaked to individuals who were not on a “need to know” basis”? This is where the importance of biometrics comes into play.

Biometric Authentication refers to the usage of software that looks for physical markers to allow access to a system. Some of the most commonly used physical markers are fingerprints, face-recognition, voice-recognition, and iris-recognition (Williams & Sawyer, 2015). As no two humans are exactly alike biometics are less likely to be hacked, although it is not impossible.

Technology is always improving, and new software is always being developed. One of these new technologies that have been developed is biometrics. Biometrics is the process by which a person's unique physical and other traits are detected and recorded by an electronic device or system as means of confirming identity (Dictionary.com, 2013). In recent years, the FBI has employed new biometrics technology.

Face recognition is another biometric technology. Face recognition uses the same technology that iris recognition uses. For face recognition, a camera takes several images of a person to find out who it is. Face recognition differs from all of the other biometric technologies because the person that is in the picture does not have to cooperate with the process. In all of the other technologies it requires the people to actively participate in the process. In face recognition, the image can be taken without the person even knowing that it took place.

Traditionally, the biometric based technologies perform the identification of the person based on the physiological characters

In this way the biometric data of the user through sensors pick up and then passed to the feature extractor to generate a template.

Biometrics Technologies is the biological identification of a person, from their eyes, voice, hand prints, fingerprints, retina patterns and handwritten signatures (Tavani 214).

Biometrics, spanning several physical and behavioral features such as faces, eyes, fingers, gaits or voice patterns are made use of for identification purposes. Biometrics provide the added advantage that no additional thing such as token, card or passwords, are required for identification purposes.

You have seen biometric technology in the films Mission: Impossible and Gattaca. The technology has also graced the covers of many weekly news magazines. But many people, even though the technology has been widely talked about for the last half decade, are still surprisingly unaware of what biometrics are and why the technology is so important for computer security and personal identification.

Public acceptance of biometric systems has a critical impact on their success due to their potential misuse of biometric data. Unlike passwords and tokens, compromised biometric templates cannot be revoked and reissued. Therefore it is illegally acquired by an attacker, not only the security of the system is at risk but the privacy and the security of the user may be compromised forever too. So granting template security is one of the most important issues in practical. The need of protecting user sensitive information locally and performing secure user authentication remotely become more increasing.

Biometric technologies are getting better and finely tuned. The rate of false readings and errors has sharply fallen. However it still requires careful consideration and planning to implement a biometric identification system. They are most costly and complicated to implement as compared with other authentication systems. A proper evaluation of the system is important before purchasing any biometric system. A thorough risk analysis is necessary. In many cases biometrics may be overkill. Biometrics must be used if there is high level of risk involved. Customer acceptance is also important when logging on to company websites. Home users might not be ready to install biometrics on home computers for online banking.

Our modern day era faces a never ending problem of securing our most integrated data and messages. The chief problem is to protect our data in a unique way that could only be worked upon by the sender and the receiver. Most of the traditional techniques stresses on keys that are generated by generic function, algorithms or in random key generators. But question remains whether this key is unique and reliable in nature. Moreover how can these keys be unique to one and only one person? The answer to this would be Biometric Cryptosystems. Biometric Cryptosystems are the newest inventions in the field of security. The fundamentals of this Biometric Cryptosystem lies on the very fact that some features of human body are significantly unique to each and every person in the world, such as fingerprint, DNA sequence, Iris, etc. Using those biometric we can generate an exclusive key that will be unique for each and every individual. With these keys we can encrypt our message. And as because these keys are uniquely generated for individual person there’s no chance that there will be another matching key. Hence, eavesdropper or third unwanted parties have to acquire two set of keys which adds up to security level of the encryption and hence protect the message from unwanted third parties from acquiring our secret message.[2]