The new face (well, not only face) of biometrics, II

reader duo. Its design places the user’s hand grip in direct contact with the palm reader embedded into the mouse. “The palm of hand area is two inches by two inches and is an intricate, data-rich structure. We can capture, classify and identify patterns with infrared lights. This technology looks below the skin’s surface at vein patterns. It looks like a bunch of squiggly worms,” Jerry Byrnes, manager of biometrics and strategy planning for Fujitsu, told TechNewsWorld. The technology produces a false rejection rate of 0.0007 percent. The false acceptance rate is 0.01 percent, he said. “We use a liveness test. It needs to sense flowing blood. The device can’t be spoofed,” Byrnes ventured.

The use of different types of biometric devices is meant to address different needs. Some industries will be served better than others by these next-gen biometric technologies. For instance, vascular biometrics using vein patterns may be an attractive option for some sectors, but the hardware deployment may not be conducive or even possible for all enterprises, noted Byrnes. Fujitsu’s palm and mouse device is already well established in the Japanese banking industry, among others. But the market in the U.S. is much different. There’s generally less concern over security, in part because the insurance business in the U.S. covers damages from security breaches. “One of the biggest and first adopters in the U.S. is the healthcare industry. Compliance rules are driving biometrics acceptance and development. Corporate officials literally have jail hanging over their heads. Our method is well accepted. Another area of adoption [for next-gen biometrics devices] is patient ID and authorization,” Byrnes said.

Rather than looking for applications that provide all their own biometric capabilities, users are looking to external providers to support biometric verification for all applications, according to Imprivata’s Ting. For example, his company’s ProveID application programming interface, which accesses OneSign biometric authentication, is being used by multiple healthcare and financial applications to offload the responsibility for all the workflow, credential storage and device management necessary to support biometrics.

“We expect this trend to continue as more applications are required to comply with having biometric support. This is a win/win for both customers and application providers,” said David Ting, CTO of Imprivata. The end user does not want multiple proprietary devices for individual applications or the need to individually learn to use and enroll with different systems. Similarly, app providers generally don’t want to constantly wrestle with the complexities of different authentication technologies, he added.

Most of the biometric technology provided by laptop computer vendors is based on device-centric methods. This means the reference biometric data sets are typically locally stored on the specific device used during enrollment, rather than stored and processed centrally as one would for enterprise use, Ting explained. “Imprivata has long held the opinion that all reference biometric data need to be stored and managed centrally to offer the maximum flexibility and security for the end users,” said Ting.

The OneSign server securely stores the reference fingerprint biometric for all users and supports fingerprint lookup across a distributed environment. This model is more operationally correct within healthcare, government, financial services and utility applications.

Next-generation enterprise biometric solutions will evolve toward being able to work both with centralized, distributed as well as mobile devices, such as smartcards or contractless smartcards, according to Ting. Another aspect for enterprise-based solutions is the ability to be interoperable across different devices.

This will make it possible for the end user to work with different sensor technologies on different platforms without having to enroll with multiple systems. This need will become more significant as first-generation scanners get replaced by newer ones, predicted Ting.