Concept in Definition ABC

How do you get into your email? And to your social networks? The answer is obvious: using a password. Also on your smartphone (what is called a PIN, that combination of four or six numbers that only you know), Although here many of us enjoy that the terminal can read our fingertips, recognize our faces, or retina.

This is what is called ID biometric, and this practice constitutes the future of personal identification in substitution of passwords.

Biometrics consists of the identification of unique characteristics of each person to verify their identity in a computer system.

Are they really unique? Are there not two people with the same fingerprints or whose reading the iris give the same results? Although the technology It has its limitations, the answer to the first question is yes, and the second is no.

Both fingerprints and the iris of our eyes have so many characteristics that they make virtually impossible for the same pattern to repeat itself, least of all at the same historical moment, and that it be detectable. That a

farmer Japanese 6th century AD C. had an iris that could pass through mine in a biometric recognition system can be a risk for the safety... more than null.

Biometric recognition systems have become popular on mobile devices thanks to the improvement of the reading systems, their miniaturization, and the cheaper of their manufacture and inclusion in a device electronic.

Thus, for example, now any high-end smartphone incorporates both a fingerprint reader and software that can read and interpret faces, irises and retinas. The latter is possible thanks to the front camera, which the terminals had already been carrying for a long time, and an infrared LED light that acts to illuminate the biometric element to be read.

However, before reaching smartphones, some laptops already included a fingerprint reader to facilitate unlocking, why laptops specifically? Well, because they are the most susceptible to being lost or misplaced.

Currently, these biometric systems are combined with traditional password or pin identification systems.

While intercepting or cracking a password is easy, it is not trivial to circumvent the security of a biometric system.

To do this, we have few more options to present to the reader, the original item to read. Fear of having your finger cut off or your eye gouged out to access important data? Don't worry: to get a correct reading, you must to run blood from the finger and from the eye, which requires that these elements remain "glued" to the rest of your body.

With this, the companies that manufacture and implement these systems seek to avoid possible extreme violence to force access to the devices.

Other biometric control measures go through the reading of the shape of the palm of the hand, and of the veins of the fingers (or, eventually, of the hand or other parts of the body).

The future of biometrics is to replace the current passwords, so that we do not have to remember any combination of letters and numbers, but we're still going to have to live with passwords and PINs for quite a while weather.

Photos: Fotolia - Onidji / Nanuvision

Topics in Biometrics