
At 10:06 PM 1/24/03 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: ...
That's generally true of biometrics. Unless taking the measurement is so intrusive it's obvious when it's taken (e.g., maybe the geometry of your sinus cavities or some such thing that requires a CAT scan to measure properly), there's no secret. People constantly seem to get themselves in trouble trying to use biometrics in a system as though they were secret. The best you can usually do is to make it moderately expensive and difficult to actually copy the biometric in a way that will fool the reader. But this is really hard. In fact, making special-purpose devices that are hard to copy or imitate is pretty difficult. It seems enormously harder to find a hard-to-copy, easy-to-use "token" that just happens to come free with a normal human body. I think the best way to think about any biometric is as a very cheap, moderately hard to copy identification token. Think of it like a good ID card that just happens to be very hard to misplace or lend to your friends. --John Kelsey, kelsey.j@ix.netcom.com
participants (1)
-
John Kelsey