Biometric recognition: How do I know who you are?

Abstract

A wide variety of systems require reliable personal recognition schemes to either confirm or determine the identity of an individual requesting their services. The purpose of such schemes is to ensure that the rendered services are accessed only by a legitimate user, and not anyone else. Examples of such applications include secure access to buildings, computer systems, laptops, cellular phones and ATMs. In the absence of robust person recognition schemes, these systems are vulnerable to the wiles of an impostor. Biometric recognition, or simply biometrics, refers to the automatic recognition of individuals based on their physiological and/or behavioral characteristics. By using biometrics it is possible to confirm or establish an individual's identity based on who she is, rather than by what she possesses (e.g., an ID card) or what she remembers (e.g., a password). Although biometrics emerged from its extensive use in law enforcement to identify criminals, i.e., forensics, it is being increasingly used today to carry out person recognition in a large number of civilian applications (e.g., national ID card, e-passport and smart cards) [1], [2]. Most of the emerging applications can be attributed to increased security threats as well as fraud associated with various financial transactions (e.g., credit cards). What biological measurements qualify to be a biometric? Any human physiological and/or behavioral characteristic can be used as a biometric characteristic as long as it satisfies the following requirements: Universality: each person should have the characteristic; Distinctiveness: any two persons should be sufficiently different in terms of the characteristic; Permanence: the characteristic should be sufficiently invariant (with respect to the matching criterion) over a period of time; Collect ability: the characteristic can be measured quantitatively. However, in a practical biometric system (i.e., a system that employs biometrics for person recognition), there are a number of other issues that should be considered, including: Performance, which refers to the achievable recognition accuracy and speed, the resources required to achieve the desired performance, as well as the operational and environmental factors that affect the performance; Acceptability, which indicates the extent to which people are willing to accept the use of a particular biometric identifier (characteristic) in their daily lives; Circumvention, which reflects how easily the system can be fooled using fraudulent methods. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.