BIOMETRIC IDENTIFIERS

Controlling access to prohibited areas and protecting important government and civilian objects are among the main activities of national and international security organizations. Similarly, with the advancement of large-scale networks (e.g., social networks, e-commerce, e-learning) and the growing concern for identity theft problems, the design of appropriate personal authentication systems is becoming more and more important. Usually, person authentication for access control to a prohibited area or for identification in different networks or social services scenarios (e.g., banking, welfare disbursement, immigration policies, etc.) is done using biometric authentication. “Biometrics is the science of identifying or verifying the identity of a person based on physiological or behavioral characteristics.” Over the last decades, people are using biometric authentication system in lieu of password or token based authentication systems for properties such as uniqueness, permanence over time, universality, user acceptance, and ease of use.

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 identity. Some of the physiological characteristics that are now used for biometric recognition include face, fingerprint, hand-geometry, ear, iris, retina, DNA, palm print, hand vein, etc. Voice, gait, signature, keystroke dynamics are examples of behavioral characteristics used for 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.