Evaluating the reliability of commercially available biometric devices

The need for secure and accurate authentication at the entry point of every network is becoming increasingly evident. This paper considers commercial-grade biometric technologies and investigates whether their performance is sufficient to warrant their use as replacements for current user authentication methods. For this purpose, a variety of commercial-grade biometric devices were tested and their characteristics (mainly their accuracy) were assessed. From this assessment, optical fingerprint technology proved to be generally the most reliable while other techniques (such as thermal fingerprint scanning and voice verification) demonstrated good performance characteristics; although they were subject to a number of false rejections, they still did not tolerate any impostor access the network. Keystroke analysis, face recognition and dynamic signature verification all displayed average performance characteristics, with occurrences of false rejections as well as false acceptances.