Module 16: Biometrics Technologies and Ethics

1. Module 16: Biometrics Technologies and Ethics • Introduction and Definitions • The Biometrics Authentication Process • Biometric System Components • The Future of Biometrics J. M. Kizza - Ethical And Social Issues

2. Introduction • A biometric is a physical or psychological trait that can be measured, recorded, and quantified. • Such traits are abundant in the human body and in access control are used to do a biometric enrollment and stored in a database. • Biometric technology, based on human attributes, is perhaps one of the safest and most reliable and most secure form of access control so far in use. • Access control technologies are based on three axioms: • Something you know – which includes all passwords and pass phrases • Something you have – which include all physical security passes like pass cards, access cards, and all sorts of access cards. • Something you are – which includes all human attributes. This group is where biometrics fall. J. M. Kizza - Ethical And Social Issues

3. The Biometrics Authentication Process • Key steps for a biometric authentication process are: • Image capture – using a biometric reader or scanner • Image recognition – based on a standard biometric algorithm • Template creation - again using a standard biometric algorithm and extracted features • Matching of the templates – both the live and stored templates of the individual are compared for a match using a standard biometric algorithm. J. M. Kizza - Ethical And Social Issues

4. A standard biometric authentication comprises the following functional units: • Sensor device a reader or scanner to acquire the biometric raw data from the individual. The reader or scanner can capture images from a fingerprint, a face, an iris, or a sound from a microphone. Readers or scanners at this stage may do some limited preprocessing without introducing foreign information or creating redundancy • Feature extraction to extract traits used in the creation of the template • Matcher to compare the live template with the stored reference template • Reference archive for storing the biometric reference templates J. M. Kizza - Ethical And Social Issues

5. Biometric System Components • The components of a biometric system are: • Data Acquisition • Enrolments • Signal Processing • Decision Policy J. M. Kizza - Ethical And Social Issues

6. Types of Biometric Technologies • Biometric technologies confirm a person's identity by scanning physical characteristics. • These traits include: • Finger Biometrics - involves taking an individual’s fingerprints • Hand Geometry -Hand features are extracted and taken as the defining feature vector of the user's hand • Face Biometrics – are distinctive features of the subject’s face • Voice Biometrics - individual voice components called phonemes. • Handwriting Analysis - a person's specific features from his/her handwriting J. M. Kizza - Ethical And Social Issues

7. Iris Biometrics - the features that exist in the colored tissue surrounding the pupil of the subject’s eye. • Retina - unique pattern of blood vessels with distinctive traits in a human eye J. M. Kizza - Ethical And Social Issues

8. Biometric Performance • The measure of performance of a biometric is based on three concepts: • false accept rate (FAR) • false non match or reject rate (FRR), • failure to enroll rate (FTE or FER). • Biometric performance is commonly the rate at which both accept and reject errors are equal. • This rate is referred to as the equal error rate (EER). • We want EER to be as low as possible for a good biometric algorithm J. M. Kizza - Ethical And Social Issues

9. The Future of Biometrics • With increasing miniaturalization, price reduction, easy of use, less intrusive, and more invasiveness, the future of biometric technology seem bright than ever before. J. M. Kizza - Ethical And Social Issues