Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Iris vs. Finger

The future of iris scanning - ZDNetAsia.com

UPDATE: This post gets a fair amount of traffic. The link above no longer seems to work. A cached version of the article linked above may be available here. The page takes a while to load.
Biometrics has received a lot of bad press during its short life. Fingerprint technologies have issues many businesses, and security professionals, would rather not deal with. And then there is the cost. So is there a technology that may provide security, involve low maintenance costs, minimize management headaches, and is acceptable to users?
Author Tom Olzak does a good job of comparing fingerprint authentication systems to systems that use the eye's iris and he makes excellent points about their strengths and weaknesses.

As we like to say, there is no "universal donor" in biometric identity management deployments. In some cases fingerprints are the best, in others, face recognition will be the way to go. Function dictates form. A successful deployment requires a deep understanding of the use model.