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Contents 
Introduction
The world's easiest business case?
The big sticking point
Putting your finger on it
Sidebar: Getting a feel for biometrics |
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Biometrics technology is far more reliable and better understood than it was just a few years ago. Having lost its sci-fi perception, finding the road forward will rely on the willingness of various companies to embrace the technology -- and to do so publicly so that others can learn from their experiences.
Over time, biometric authentication may find its speed as an element of the overall trend towards implementation of comprehensive identity management infrastructures. This trend is based around the idea of identity management, a relatively new catchphrase that has revived disparate earlier efforts in areas such as remote user authentication, PKI, policy-based access control, directory services integration, and other elements.
A recent META Group analysis argued that identity infrastructure would be tightly integrated into application stacks over the next few years, then cease to be a standalone product market by 2007 as user lifecycle management is brought closer to other IT operations functions. As such identity management becomes pervasive and standards are put into place, biometrics could well merit another look as one of many end user authentication technologies capable of integrating with federated identity management systems.
Much of that integration will come as biometrics vendors continue their work to standardise interfaces to biometric authentication devices. In this area, the work of the BioAPI Consortium (www.bioapi.org) has united around 90 vendors to standardise interfaces between biometric equipment and corporate security infrastructures.
Hardware interfaces have been relatively standardised by the publication of BioAPI 1.0 back in 2000, a more recent update to v1.1 and the companion international v2.0; however, tying BioAPI-compliant devices into corporate authentication frameworks still requires more work.
For biometrics advocates, the technology's ongoing slow progress remains a source of considerable frustration. Although gradual penetration of fingerprint scanners indicates theindustry is showing tentative support for biometrics as a general form of authentication, it is still not clear what will make the industry dispel corporate fears of the technology once and for all.
Although many corporates continue to consider biometrics for limited use in niche applications, for now most will continue to watch government-run biometrics projects with interest.
Despite their ambitious scope, such projects -- initially focused on border control -- will be the litmus test for biometrics in broad usage, highlighting how far the technology has actually come and providing a framework for future planning among businesses keen to revisit their user authentication.
"I don't think biometrics is likely to reach ubiquity at a corporate level until the business case for the introduction of biometrics is so clearly apparent for people [that they can't avoid it]," says Dunstone.
"The cost of biometrics has decreased and the relative level of threat and awareness by business has increased, but I think we're probably at least five years away from seeing it in a ubiquitous sense."
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