It seems that access control manufacturers are always trying to prove the effectiveness of one form of entry control over another. And that holy grail of knowing those identifiers — what someone has, what someone knows, and who someone is — can’t always be found by using one type of solution.
If you really want to know exactly who is entering your premises, a biometric-based authentication method is probably going to be your most reliable bet. Why then are biometrics not more widely used? Are we still hung up on films like Minority Report, where Tom Cruise’s character has his own eyes replaced to avoid iris recognition?
Phil Scarfo, vice president for worldwide sales and marketing at Lumidigm, told us there are some legacy issues surrounding biometrics in people’s minds. Poor performance, cost, and privacy are the main ones. However, time and technology have moved on. “We now find ourselves in a situation where biometrics performance is excellent, the ROI is compelling, and there are multiple ways to protect user privacy.”
He certainly believes that biometrics-based technologies now offer the most foolproof access control option available as people come to realize that passwords, tokens, and other forms of authentication can be cumbersome, complex, insecure, and inconvenient. He says that most systems based on cards, tokens, PINs, and passwords “are at best tools to provide an approximate identity.” They do not guarantee with any degree of certainty the identity of the one holding the cards, PIN, or password.
The role of biometrics will most certainly increase as users become increasingly unwilling to sacrifice convenience for security. With a properly deployed biometric solution, they are able to get both today.
Robin Howland at Spica International agrees that biometrics manufacturers have some mopping up to do, particularly when it comes to fingerprint technology.
In its early days for time and attendance, fingerprint technology was often missold as the perfect solution, capable of identifying individuals reliably in large populations. This works with forensic applications, but as a technology on your door, this is still not true, even though there are now far more reliable technologies available. Many users have had bad experiences with oversold early fingerprint systems, and with cheaper solutions that do not fulfil their promise.
Biometrics, particularly at the higher end of the spectrum, are still perceived as a high-cost option. Is that about to change? Scarfo says any costs need to be measured against the rising cost of the problem: identity theft, waste, fraud, etc. “The cost of the solution has steadily been falling. We are now at a point where the economic benefit is real, measurable, and compelling.”
Howland said:
The most reliable methods have proved more expensive, such as 3D facial recognition, the higher-quality fingerprint sensors/algorithms, and iris scanning. However, in access control and workforce management, cost is no longer a massive issue — not unless quality is required.
Being able to determine someone’s identity through unique human characteristics throws up many uncomfortable privacy issues, and some regions of the world are more accepting of this type of authentication than others. Scarfo’s view is that we may have a right to privacy, but the same rights are not necessarily afforded to our anonymity if we are to implement any kind of meaningful security measures in a world where so much of our personal information is readily available.
Knowing “who” really does matter and can be just as much an agent for good as an agent for evil. Likewise, once people realize that privacy risks are far greater from social media and information that we freely volunteer about ourselves than can be obtained by a biometric template, their attitudes about strong authentication often change.
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