Trend: Vascular biometrics gets under your skin Vein pattern biometrics is a modality that is garnering a lot of interest, says Rick Lazarick, chief scientist at the identity labs for CSC. Some large-scale test results show that both finger vein and palm vein biometrics are extremely accurate, he says, and possess some really important convenience attributes. The modality is being used in ATMs throughout Japan as well as in Brazil and Poland. “The ATM implementations show that they have the capability to be used in large scale and mainstream applications,” Lazarick says. The Japanese ATMs use three-factor authentication for transactions – card, PIN and a vascular biometric, says Walter Hamilton, a senior consultant at ID Technology Partners and chairman of the International Biometrics and Identification Association. The technology is starting to show up in North America as well. The Port of Halifax in Nova Scotia is using vascular technology for physical access control and Baycare Health System in Tampa, Fla. is using it for patient identification, Hamilton says. “It works well, and based on independent testing, I see the technology being just as accurate as fingerprint for one-to-one matching,” Hamilton says. “I also see the general population having fewer challenges submitting a good sample of their vein pattern in comparison to the problem some people have with fingerprints.” Some individuals have difficulty with enrolling a usable fingerprint sample, Hamilton says. Very fine fingerprints are tough to pick up and others may have damaged their fingerprints making it difficult to get an image and then match later. Vein pattern biometrics use light to map the vascular pattern underneath the skin so the surface doesn’t matter. Failure-to-enroll rates for vein pattern technologies are very low, Hamilton says.
Hitachi takes vein pattern to the masses Hitachi’s VeinID finger vein scanners have been deployed since 2004 by major banks in Japan and more recently Poland,” says Lew Iadarola, VeinID sales manager for Hitachi Security Solutions. “Some South American banks are conducting trials as well.” “In total we have more than 100,000 embedded modules in ATMs, time and attendance readers and other devices,” says Iadarola. Another 100,000 of the company’s USB-connected logical access readers have also been deployed for authentication to various networks and applications, he notes. According to Iadarola, one of the largest use cases in the U.S. is with Konica Minolta’s bizhub multi-function printers. The finger vein scanner secures document output in government, military and health care environments. Additionally, Japanese telecom giant KDDI has deployed more than 10,000 VeinID scanners for employee logon. Rather than using the biometric to identify an unknown individual from a population, Iadarola sees vascular technology as ideal for operational biometrics. “Use the vein pattern to ensure the individual is who they claim to be and only then initiate the service, access or transaction,” he says. “Our focus with VeinID is one-to-one matching on a smart card or device,” he explains. This comes from the company’s historical preference to enhance privacy in public facing applications. Many of our large customers preferred to minimize the liability that comes with handling personally identifiable information by performing match-on-card transactions rather than storing information in a database, he says. Government Integrators and end-users worldwide did not want to use the same technologies used and stored in databases by law enforcement. “Some people want to buy a coke, rent a car, and pick up their prescriptions without providing something personally identifiable,” he concludes. “People prefer to verify identity and walk away leaving nothing behind.”
Test results have shown that the technology is very reliable, adds Lazarick. “Many times vascular outperforms iris,” he says. It can also be viewed as a privacy-enabling technology compared to fingerprints, iris and facial, Hamilton says. Fingerprints leave a residue that can be lifted off a surface and potentially replicated.
“Some people doubt (fingerprint biometrics’) ability for credentialing because there’s a chance someone may copy a fingerprint from a glass,” Hamilton says. Since vein pattern records the pattern beneath the surface it’s virtually impossible to covertly observe. “Unions and certain segments that would object to fingerprints would not object to vein pattern,” Hamilton says.
Fall 2010
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