In one awesomely tiny package they facilitate data collection, storage and access to data stored elsewhere.
As a platform for near field communication (NFC) and SMS One-time passwords, mobile devices are also increasingly being used to deliver identity management applications by using a person's known possession of the device as a way of verifying their identity. In access control lingo, mobile devices are being used as tokens.
Using mobile devices is a dream come true for businesses that rely upon tokens: Your customer already owns it; If they lose it, they will be aware of the loss very quickly and they will replace it at their own expense; People are disinclined to lend their phone/credential to someone else; Etc.
Now to the question of securing the device itself and biometric modalities.
Fingerprints are currently the most frequently used biometric for overtly identifying cooperative, habituated individuals. They have a lot of things going for them. Fingerprints are well-understood scientifically, durable, reliable, and fingerprint ID management techniques have been shown to deliver high return on investment in many applications.
These are some of the reasons I lamented Motorola's announcement that it was leaving the fingerprint sensor out of the Atrix 2. The decision makes sense, though. The fingerprint sensor wouldn't be widely used until developers had written software using it, but including the sensor would drive up the cost of each unit for a thinly-used feature. The innovation chicken-and-egg problem is a real one and Motorola seems to have made the judgement that they weren't gaining enough of an advantage in the highly-competitive mobile device market by including it.
But that hasn't meant the end of mobile device biometrics. Just as businesses that issue tokens have been able to take advantage of the fact that their users are already carrying the necessary technology around with them, biometric identity management application developers are doing the same.
Mobile devices already contain the hardware required to deliver two biometric modalities: a camera for facial recognition and a microphone for voice. These modalities present challenges not usually associated with fingerprint biometrics — in the case of facial recognition challenges include lighting and the well-publicized photograph hack; for voice, background noise can be a problem — but they offer the advantage that the hardware is "free" and never going to be yanked out of mobile devices. That's quite an advantage, and it points to why face and voice biometrics are the front-runners for handset biometrics.
Nice and tidy, eh?
So, what to make of today's news that Fujitsu is set to compete more aggressively in the global handset market?
Fujitsu Aims for European Mobile Phone Market (Financial Times)
Fujitsu’s smartphones will certainly feature electronic money technology – enabling owners to use NFC, the mobile payment system – and biometric recognition to make their use as mobile wallets more secure.Fujitsu, more than any other handset manufacturer, is deeply involved in biometric sensor hardware (finger, palm) that doesn't currently reside on stock mobile platforms. So stay tuned.
