IDA Automatic identification n. 3 - June 2001

THE OPINION

BIOMETRY: I BET ON THE DIGITAL FINGERPRINTS

of Giulio Camagni

president of Partner Data S.r.l.*

Certainly the biometric aknowledgement isn't a news: a normal  identify card is an efficent strument of biometric aknowledgement: thanks the photo and the various indications we can identify its owner. But it have a limit: the aknoeledgement is possible only face to face. Today this kind of identificarion isn't more sufficient: we need an aknowledgement by distance: not only for Internet but also the modern telepohny needs a sure identification of whom asks or use services. On one side is frequently indispensable to know surely if who asks a service is authorized to have it (autentication); from the other we need to be sure about the identity of who actived a process. The biometric aknowledgement, evenctually with digital fingerprints, today is the better soluction for the needs over cited: a token (a smartcard or one of the key for USB port with cryptografic chip) if equipped of algorithms of asymmetric coding  gives the best security about the correct identification of the same token; but isn't the same about the user: if someone know the pin can use  the token of someone else and we know that isn't impossible to discover him. The substitution of the PIN with a biometric data give many advantages: give the emergency of the identification, it cannot be forgottenand,it rapresent an easy and economic soluction. 

In my opinion the digital fingerprints will have the best success; they are cheap, difficult to copy, usefull and the technology they use is so small that permict an easy insert in a notebook or a portable phone that with the UMTS models we will use to get in internet.

To play aganist the digital fingerprints there are some things: the first is that remember us the schedule of the criminals; the second one is the wrong idea that the fingerprints is a problem for our privacy. All the reader doesn't register the sign of the finger, but a code (minutiae/template), obtained by the image of the fingerprint; only the militar/police sistem register the image of the fingerprint.

So we have only to improve the marketing and the information about the digital fingerprint.

We have more problems about the standards: as for every young technology every society has envelope its mode of interpretation of the fingerprint, however there are international round table to define a standard, as happened for the smartcard that has found in the PC/SC the universal standard. Just some months ago Microsoft bought  the technology of a socety expert in biometry to bring this ones in every PC.

And there are more things that bring to think that biometry will be used everyday. For exemple the law 675 on privacy that impose to the society to protect its data and to give the access only to authorized people: the fingerprint recognizement to activate the logon to a PC, to permict the access to a net or domain, to decode a file/disc... answer to all the needs of security that the law ask; and we don't have to remember any password neither to bring with us ani token 

Today we have to access to many site/application protected from password: the online band, our trader, private net, intranet... I assure that is very confortable to substitute all the IDs and password with one only finger touch, like every good program attached to the reader permict.

As every prodouct catch up its success when the technology is equal to the needs and the costs of the technology can be diluited in the quantity of the prodouct parts: today we could be arrived at this point for the digital fingerprint. And, talking about technologies, the fingerprints silicon sensor detector, made with a thin sheet of silicon and very small, have more chance of the optical detector that are very bigger

And so this is why i think that digital fingerprints detector today con rappresentate a very useful instrument in the world of informatic and telecom and why i share the opinion of who,  as the Internationel Biometric Groups, consider the market of the biometry in a big growth , previwing for it a growth more ten tims upper from 1999, without considerig the military/police applications.

(*)Partner Data S.r.l. work since 1984 in the world of informatic security, distributing in all Italy hardware and software soluctions.