Biometrics

Biometrics is specifically implemented to digitally identify the individuals based on their biological or behavioural characteristics to allow access to the systems, devices, or data. The best examples of biometrics included facial patterns, fingerprints, and voice or typing cadence. These types of identifiers can be used to recognize the individual and the combination of these technologies allows providing greater accuracy in identification.
Biometrics can be used for authenticating the person’s identity that leads to an increase the enterprise security.

Computers and devices embedded with biometrics technology which can detect the identity of a particular person. The organizations which have been used the Biometrics need to be taken care of how the technology used to avoid infringing on employee or customer privacy or improper exposing of sensitive information. Some of the organizations have been adopted biometrics specifically for facilitating secure IT infrastructure in SaaS, Cloud, and hybrid environments.

Different Types of Biometrics
As biometric identifiers related to the intrinsic human characteristics, they have two types of categories such as physical and behavioural biometrics. Physical identifiers are basically immutable and device-independent that subsumed (TechTarget, 2019):
Fingerprints
As technology tremendously increased its footprint in various applications, fingerprints are the most popular type of biometrics due to the widespread deployment in smartphones. In most of the companies, fingerprint scanning is the common authentication type of biometrics that automatically detects the employees’ presence.

Physiological Recognition
Facial recognition is another most commonly used type of biometrics device that lets to authenticate the identity of individuals. In the category of physiological recognition, there are other types of imaging methods such as iris or rental recognition, ear recognition, palm or vein recognition, etc.

Photo and Video
If a device is embedded with the camera, there is a possibility of authenticating the person’s identity through the common approaches like facial recognition and rental scans.

Voice
Through voice authentication devices and telephone-based service portals, companies can recognize the users and authenticate the customers.

Signature
The digital signature authentication devices can be used mostly at retail checkouts and banks as well where users or customers want to sign their names for protecting the data.

DNA
Initially, DNA identification has been used to solve law enforcement suspects. Now, it has been too slow for widespread use.

Whereas behavioural identifiers are a newer approach and being used in collaboration with other methods owing to the lower reliability. As technology improves, it will also increase the existence of a wide variety of applications. It is limited to some types of human characteristics, unlike human identifiers. The behavioural approach has been used to distinguish between a human and a robot that assists the organizations to sort out or detect the spam attempts to access the accounts. Different types of behavioural approaches will be discussed here that subsumed:

Typing Patterns
In general, everyone has their own typing style and speed. That means, it automatically detects the identity based on the speed at which they type, the degree of impact on the keyboard, and the length of the time taking from one letter to another(Korolov, 2019) .

Physical Movements
Based on the physical movements like walking of an individual, it will detect the authentication for particularly at sensitive locations.

Navigation Patterns
As finger movements on the touch-pad or mouse movements are unique in individuals, companies can authenticate the users’ identity without using any other additional software.

Engagement Patterns
The engagement patterns will interact with the devices to distinguish persons from bots. It obviously works efficiently until the bots developed in imitating of the humans.

Is Biometric Authentication Reliable?
The biometric authentication types like fingerprint or voice recognition systems can be used in most of the organizations to detect the individuals. But, they have included false positives and false negatives too. For instance, a facial recognition system might not work efficiently when a user wearing make-up or glasses or the one who sick or tired (Thales, 2019).

The voice also may vary in the sense that the person’s voice can change in different situations like angry or impatient or after waking up. In these scenarios, biometric authentication fails by detecting the wrong information that causes insecurity for the organizations.To avoid this, most of the experts suggested that it’s better to use multiple types of authentication devices simultaneously and find out the suspicious activities easily by analyzing the warning signs immediately (Korolov, 2019).

Is Biometric Authentication Secure?
The security of biometric authentication should be attained by the organization to avoid the loss of customers’ data. If any company wants to collect the customers’ data and keep it on their own servers, they mandate to follow the best security measures. By using improved technological ways, companies need not store the authentication information on the servers to maintain a high level of security (Korolov, 2019).