Fingerprint Biometrics & Paper Pushing
Posted by StormWarning on 30 Nov 2006 at 03:14 pm | Tagged as: Current Affairs, National Security, Opinions, Technology
So much has been written about the use of biometrics and its benefits. I’ve recently had a personal experience that illustrates for me one of the downsides of this "unpanacea" approach to security.
The office building in which I work has a fingerprint biometric access control keypad for entry in "off hours." After nearly nine months of occupying my office and after four separate attempts to enroll my fingerprints into the system, it still doesn’t work. I need to use my good old numeric password (anyone who knows anything about the use of static passwords knows how vulnerable they are) to enter the building.
Why don’t my fingerprints work? It seems that I am part of the select group of 2% of the population who has "worn pads." What’s a "worn pad?" Well it seems that my fingerprints have no defined ridges. Why are my pads worn? Probably because in the old days of business, before copy machines that did collation automatically, I often spent hours collating pages and pages of 20# bond paper for reports that had to get out in the mail (yes, long before email and attachments). That doesn’t mean that a junior CSI couldn’t pick up a great print off a window (or whatever), but it does mean that at least in this situation, the reader isn’t sensitive enough to validate my fingerprint for entry.
If you want to read a somewhat tongue-in-cheek blog article from one of the BIG BOYS in the "Homeland Security game," take a look at this from Accenture.
A Disturbing Little Meditation on Biometrics
…here are, however, significant practical problems with its deployment. For example, people with worn finger pads (which often characterize certain kinds of manual workers) can’t be enrolled in fingerprint recognition systems (nor—obviously—can people with lost limbs) and the total for worn pads is estimated at about 2 percent of the population. Further, we leave fingerprints wherever we go, so getting copies of other people’s biometric identifiers would be straightforward. (DNA scanners [still in the lab] suffer from a similar vulnerability.)…
Current Affairs, National Security, Opinions, Technology
