Biometrics

These days, many of us regularly feed pieces of ourselves into machines for convenience and security. Our fingerprints unlock our smartphones, and companies are experimenting with more novel biometric markers—voice, heartbeat, grip—as ID for banking and other transactions.

Biometric technologies include recognition of finger, hand, eye, face, voice, and even veins for applications in traditional sectors such as industry and homeland security.

It seems like only yesterday that Apple’s launch of its Touch ID fingerprint biometrics system was being met by mainstream media skepticism and high profile presentation attacks. But in the few short years that followed Apple’s bid on biometrics, the mobile fingerprint sensor has become almost ubiquitous. Indeed, it is almost more notable now when a smartphone ships without an embedded touch sensor, and much of the mobile biometrics market excitement has shifted to what companies are supplying the tech, than which OEMs have embraced it.

Many mobile devices come with the ability to enable some sort of biometric authentication baked in – a microphone for voice, a camera for face and even a fingerprint scanner.

The entire gesture recognition market has witnessed various advances after the launch of Microsoft Kinect which is meant for gaming consoles of Xbox 360 launched by Microsoft (U.S.). After the launch of Kinect, manufacturers and other players from the gesture control industry value chain started focusing on consumer electronics for gesture-enabled solutions.

The technology comes by way of Iris ID. To enroll, customers simply need to register their iris biometrics at a branch, which entails a digital photo of the iris. That information is converted into a biometric template against which the customer’s irises are matched whenever they approach a QNB ATM equipped with iris scanning technology.

Tokyo, December 12, 2016 - NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) today announced that it is conducting trials for cashless payment services utilizing NEC facial recognition technology in cooperation with Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Inc. (SMFG), Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) and Sumitomo Mitsui Card Co., Ltd. (Sumitomo Mitsui Card).

Tokyo, December 21, 2016 Fujitsu today announced that it will begin offering a new FIDO-compliant service for online biometric authentication. The “Online Biometric Authentication Service” will initially roll out from early April 2017, starting with Japan.

Biometrics were the talk of the town last month in Barcelona. As the world’s mobile technology companies gathered for their largest annual event, Mobile World Congress 2016, talk centered firmly around authentication and identity.

A team of researchers from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University have created sets of eyeglasses that can prevent wearers from being identified by facial recognition systems, or even fool the technology into identifying them as completely unrelated individuals.

Barclays Bank is to introduce “finger-vein ID” readers that will allow customers to junk their pin numbers, passwords and authentication codes and instead access their account with just a scan of their digit.

If you ring a call centre, the first voice you often hear isn’t real, but a digitised human with whom you “speak” to process your request using voice recognition.

As mobile biometrics technology becomes increasingly common, it is important for IT to know how to support this kind of authentication and the security vulnerabilities it may still bring.

MoneySavingExpert.com can reveal that just weeks after First Direct launched its long-awaited biometric banking system, some customers are claiming they’ve had “horrific” problems using the system, while others have ended up being told they’ll have to go into a branch to rectify the problem.

When it comes to authentication, most security professionals see it as a necessary evil. It provides security at the expense of the end user’s desire for a frictionless experience.

Biometrics has nowadays been of universal interest and has been developed and used for many purposes such as for the detection of criminals and undesirables, identification and access control. Within this paper, we would like to concern about Facial Cognitive Biometric Systems and their application in User Authentication Based on Face Recognition.

Mastercard has started rolling out a new technology that could allow customers to make purchases online by taking a selfie rather than entering a password.