ATTRIBUTES OF BIOMETRIC IDENTIFIERS

Biometric authentication offers a natural and reliable solution to the problem of establishing identity of a person utilizing his/her physiological or behavioral biometric characteristics or identifiers. The term “biometry” literally means “life science,” and focused on studying biometric identifiers. These biometric identifiers, also called biometric traits, are integral part of a person’s. Some of the physiological characteristics that are now used for biometric recognition includes face, fingerprint, hand-geometry, ear, iris, retina, DNA, palm print, hand vein, etc. Voice, gait, signature, keystroke dynamics are examples of behavioral characteristics used or biometric recognition. Soft biometrics emerged as a new group of biometric gaining more and more attention. It includes measurements related to person’s height, race, age, and gender. Finally, we identify one more group: social biometrics, making its way into the state-of-the-art security systems. This group includes data obtained from observing social behavior of the subject, interests, social network connections, work and leisure patterns, hobbies, and communication over social media.

Each of the biometric identifiers discussed above has its own advantages and disadvantages. Thus, based on the application scenarios, biometric system uses one or more biometric identifiers taking into consideration a number of factors. Researchers have identified several requirements that a biometric identifier needs to possess in order to be used in an authentication system. These requirements are either theoretical or practical. Theoretical requirements include:

·         Universality: Each person in the population should have the biometric identifier.

·         Distinctiveness: Identifiers for two persons randomly selected from the whole population should be sufficiently different across individuals comprising the population.