SECURITY MEASURES

-Biometrics

and Authentication-

By:ANONYMOUS Mohamad Fakrul Fahmi B. Kamarul zaman Syed Amirul Farid B. Syed Mhd Anis Sabrin Mohamad Aliff Izzlan B. Mat

(4 Epsilon)

In information technology, biometric authentication refers to technologies

that measure and analyze human physical and behavioural characteristics

for authentication purposes. Examples of physical (or physiological or biometric) characteristics include fingerprints, eye retinas and irises facial

patterns and hand measurements, while examples of mostly behavioural

characteristics include signature, gait and typing patterns. All behavioral biometric characteristics have a physiological component, and, to a lesser

degree, physical biometric characteristics have a behavioral element.

The main advantages of biometrics over a standard

system are:

biometric traits cannot be lost or forgotten (while passwords can) biometric traits are difficult to copy, share and distribute (passwords can be announced in crackers' websites)

they require the person being authenticated to be present at the time and point of authentication

Biometric characteristics can be divided in two main classes, as represented in figure on the right:

physiological are related to the shape of the body. The oldest traits

that have been used for more than 100

years are fingerprints, other examples are face recognition, hand geometry and iris recognition.

behavioral are related to the behavior of a person. The first characteristic to be used that is still widely used today is the signature. More modern approaches are the study of keystroke dynamics and of voice.

Example of biometric device

-Fingerprint scanner

-Iris scanner

-Face scanner

A biometric system can provide the following three functions:

Verification is he the person he claims to be? Somebody claims to be a person whose biometric info are already known (e.g. they were stored on a card or in a database).

Identification who is he? we extract biometric info from a person and we compare them with our database. It is a much more difficult task than verification because we have to compare those info with all the other entries of the database and the result must provide one clear answer.

Screening does he belong to the watch-list? We want to check if the person belongs to a group we have chosen. For example, we could use it to allow access to a restricted area only to a limited number of people or to check if a wanted person passes through a certain area.

Conclusion

Starting in the early 2000s, the use of biometrics in school has become widespread, particularly in the UK and USA. A number of justifications are given for such practices, including struggling against truancy, replacing library cards or meal cards by fingerprinting systems, etc. opponents of school biometrics have lifted up privacy concerns against the creation of databses which would progressively include the entire population.

Source of reference

Internet - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio
metric 4 June 2007