“By extracting the information of the vascular structure of a hand or finger and converting it into a mathematical quantity,” according to Nomani’s report, “this technology creates a template for each structure and then compares the template of a known individual to a suspect.” After sending the data to KSM’s CIA captors, Dick heard back: “The photo you sent me and the hand of our friend inside the cage seem identical to me.”Any durable fact regarding an individual's body can be used as a biometric identifier, provided that fact can be measured in sufficient detail.
What determines which body facts are used as biometric identifiers are used in large scale deployments is a combination of convenience (elbows are out), variance across the population (the more the better), variance over time in the same individual (the less the better).
After that, it's ROI (return on investment). Now, there probably won't be significant ROI for developing automated arm vein matching algorithms for large scale identity management deployments in the foreseeable future, but the challenge isn't so much technical as it is economic. If the identification transaction is "worth it" and you have the two data points (unknown arm vein and known arm vein) and the criteria above are met, the answer is out there. The question becomes: What is the answer worth? In this case, the answer: Quite a lot.
