Establishing public confidence in the security of fingerprint biometrics

The most common personal authentication techniques used for identity management employ a secret PIN or password that must be remembered. Password mania prevails. Fingerprint biometric technology is an ideal alternate solution to the password recall problem. However, fingerprint biometric systems still remain uncommon in public sectors of industry such as banking, healthcare, and education. Two proposed reasons for this lack of deployment are: 1) society´s misunderstanding regarding the personal privacy, security, and function of the technology, and 2) inadequate education regarding the technology. The objective of this research was to test these hypotheses, and attempt to identify the major societal factors that have limited fingerprint biometric deployment in IT authentication systems. An additional goal was to confirm that education on security issues improves personal confidence in and acceptance of the technology. With this renewed validation, fingerprint biometric authentication was deployed in the IT security labs of Brigham Young University to control access to physical facilities and computers.