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Biometrics

Biometrics is the term used to collectively describe any security measure that involves identification of people by their unique physical attributes.

Some examples of recognising authorised users are retina and iris recognition, fingerprint and handprint analysis and voice, signature and face recognition. All of these are based on identifying unique characteristics such as fingerprint whorls and rings or voice inflections, which are matched with an identity stored in an existing database. In most cases, a 100% match is impossible due to factors such as aging and eye or hand positioning so an acceptable level of matching is set.

The advantages of these systems over traditional security methods are that there are no cards to lose or numbers to forget and in most cases, they are hard to deceive due to the unique nature of the characteristics being measured.

Unfortunately, these biometric systems are also very expensive to implement and generally are only used by the military and large organisations that can justify such expense or require an extremely secure environment.

In most cases, an existing reference of the person's characteristics is required to be pre-recorded so that measured characteristics can be compared and the identity can be verified. Since a person's face and voice changes as they get older or a person's signature can alter, regular updates are needed.

Naturally, biometric identification is only feasible when the person seeking identification is personally present: it is hard to scan a person's retina, for example, if they are logging in at an Internet café in another country.

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