The Body Shop of Security: Biometrics

Introduction

Biometrics is a physical security technique that makes use of a person’s physical characteristics which are unique to that person.
This technique is used to authenticate the user’s identity and grant access to the certain things. It is a kind of personal touch for authentication which can only be done by the genuine user.

Types of Biometrics

_Physiological : _ Physiological Biometrics is based on a person’s body’s unique features like fingerprints, facial recognition, iris scan, etc. This system of authentication is difficult to forge as compared to passwords. This type of security will remain constant throughout the person’s life as physiological traits are generally stable.

_Behavioral : _ Behavioral Biometrics is based on how a person interacts with the system like typing pattern, voice patterns, mouse movements, touchscreen interactions, etc. This system instead of relying on physical features, analyze how a person interacts with the devices to identify the user. It works invisibly as they can adapt to the changing habits over time which offers a continuous security. Limited data on a new user can make initial identification difficult.

Advantages

• Elimination of the need of remembering complex passwords.
• Unauthorised access is equal to none as it is difficult to impersonate someone completely but Deepfake stands as an exception.
• Biometrics is generally faster as compared to manual entry of passwords. Even if Password Managers do autofill the login credentials, biometrics is generally considered as the fastest option.
• Accuracy level is high.

Disadvantages

• Accuracy limit is one of the concerns when the system refuses to identify the genuine user incase of inadequate light during facial recognition, dirty fingers during fingerprint validation. False positives may cause trouble sometimes.
• Storing the biometrics data is a challenging task.
• Some biometrics security operations are costly such as iris recognition.

Biometrics offer a secure and speedy way to ditch passwords, but privacy concerns need to be addressed for wider trust.