Are Biometrics Really Possible Today for Security & Tracking?

In the movies, facial scanners, finger and hand scanners, and similar 3D checkpoints are all the rage, evoking a science fiction future and a world where everything is tracked 24/7. For most of us, the closest we get to tracking right now tends to be our emails and social media.

However, biometrics are quickly finding a place for various reasons, ranging from security to unique identification. How that fits into daily life in the future will depend a lot on the business cases made for each use. However, between artificial intelligence and facial biometrics, the world will feel an awful lot like many movies in the near future.

The more formal name is facial recognition, executed with an optical scanner of some type. Many folks have already used if they started using face recognition with an Apple iPhone as security.

The algorithm essentially uses a person’s face as a unique formula for shapes, angles, textures, and depths. That, in turn, can be converted into a code that can’t be replicated without having literally the same face entered into the scanner again. The program doesn’t include all features, just those that are distinct and easy to measure with a quick scan.

This avoids problems with how people’s faces change over time with age. The science isn’t perfect, however. It can be overcome by simply producing a replica of a person’s face that is three-dimensional. Of course, very few people can easily whip up a clone of a face out of the blue, so that difficulty for now makes the system fairly secure.

Facial recognition is also used for identification in public. Multiple governments, organizations, and law enforcement agencies are using biometrics for known persons on file in their databases and matching them against people captured by images in public. When a scan captures a person who is already known, the systems send up a flag for a controller to review and determine the next course of action. It’s through these kinds of passive tools that modern security tracks the movement of persons of interest in most big cities today.

The interesting aspect that makes facial recognition attractive as a security measure is the inability to recreate the image independently. Passwords failed a long time ago as a secure intrusion prevention method because they could be brute-force guessed by computers. This is why they have had to become longer and more complex.

Eventually, with enough time, a computer will guess any password. The extreme length is simply a workaround to make it take so long; when the computer does guess the right formula, the security is no longer needed, or the password is changed. However, as computers continue to improve, so do their capabilities. And each new wave makes that guess time shorter and shorter.

Alternatively, a computer can’t replicate a face. The amount of detail variation in each facial image is simply too much for even the best computers right now. Ergo, reverse engineering on the fly isn’t possible.

Combine the image with encryption, and capturing a pass in the wild is pretty much not going to happen. Then, when the biometrics are combined with an additional security layer via multifactor authentication (MFA), it’s game over.

The hack pretty much needs the cooperation of an authorized user to bypass that kind of system. No surprise, most hacks now look for ways to coerce users to give up their secure pass elements instead. The human user becomes the weakest link in the security chain again.

For today’s businesses, it might be surprising to know that facial biometric verification has been worked on since the 1960s. However, some 60 years later, that exact science has been applied in practice and improved to such a level it is like the movies coming to life in real-time. Since 2000, artificial intelligence has been brought into the mix, speeding up the science and practical application. As a result, biometrics today are powerful enough to pass NIST standards and the National Physical Laboratory and U.K. standards.

So, if your company or organization is looking for something closest to a really “fool-proof” level of identification or tracking, biometrics is probably the answer, and it can be applied today, not some near time in the future.