Biometrics break-ins and band-aids

Currently there is much interest in the use of biometrics for authentication and identification applications. This has been heightened most recently because of the threat of terrorism. Biometrics authentication and identification systems offer several advantages over systems based on knowledge or possession such as unsupervised (legacy) password/PIN-based systems and supervised (legacy) passport-based systems. To optimize security it is important that biometrics authentication systems are designed to withstand different sources of attack. We identify some such threats to biometrics systems and detail issues related to the tradeoff between security and convenience. We further show how to estimate a biometrics' intrinsic security, sometimes called a biometrics' individuality, with fingerprints as an example. © 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.