Biometrics: Show Me your Eyes?

Cashless payment at the unmanned gas station, automatic check-in at the airport, ordering on the computer – today, many transactions are possible without personal contact. This makes it all the more important to ensure that the person in question is who they say they are.

Preventing acts of terrorism, secure online banking….

Security and the identification of persons has been hotly debated at least since the increasing terrorist actions worldwide. But these aspects are also important in normal everyday life – after all, who wants to find their account emptied because someone has gained unauthorized access? Or find out that another person has acquired a cell phone at his expense and has been phoning the world for weeks without paying the bills?

Biometric applications

One solution is promised by methods based on biometrics (from the Greek: bios = life, metrein = measure), i.e., the measurement of physiological or behavioral characteristics such as fingerprints, iris patterns or voice. This can be used either to identify individuals (by comparing their characteristics with centrally stored data of a group of people, for example fingerprints in the case of criminals) or to authenticate a person (also known as verification).

To do this, the relevant characteristics of the individual are first stored as a machine-readable reference, usually in encrypted form, and the data collected during each authentication process is compared with this reference.

The following applications are possible so far, for example:

  • Access authorization for (encrypted) data, networks, electronic services, online banking, etc.; so far, mostly no biometrics, but authentication with PIN and password is used for this, increasingly also the electronic signature
  • Authorization to enter certain rooms (for example, in high-security zones) or access them (for example, safe).
  • Biometric ID cards; in Germany, fingerprint, hand or facial characteristics are allowed by law.
  • Time recording, automation of individual settings, for example, in the car.