The Stanford Business Reporter

Issue date: 12/3/01 Section: Technology

Fingerprint scans are the most popular biometric segment, perhaps because it is the least invasive of most methods.

Analysts are predicting large growth in the biometrics market, driven in large part by a new focus on security technologies.

If the stock market is any indication, technology is certainly a battered sector. However, if last month’s ComDex is any indication, vendors continue to introduce new technologies and products at a rapid pace. Among the most promising technologies—from a market perspective, that is—are security technologies and products. Biometric based applications, where an individual uses identifiers like a fingerprint or a retinal scan to gain access to a network or a building, have increased in popularity along recent concerns about security. Biometrics is so popular that ComDex, held last month, dedicated a pavilion exclusively to these technologies.

Be Your Password

Biometrics is an automated system of recognizing a person based on the person's physical or behavioral characteristics. It is a system that recognizes a person based on "who" the person is and does not rely on the "what a person has" or "what a person knows" criteria that underlie token- and password-based security paradigms. Items that a person can “have,” such as keys and ID-badges, can be lost, stolen, or duplicated. Things that a person knows, such as passwords and pin-numbers, can be forgotten, stolen, or duplicated. Biometrics relies instead on "who" a person is—on a unique, immutable human characteristic that cannot be lost, forgotten, stolen or duplicated.

Biometric technologies have two major applications: Automated fingerprint identification systems (AFIS), and authentication (in both computer and physical security). AFIS employs a “one-to-many” matching process in which a front-end scanner feeds digitized identifiers into large database to check for matches. AFIS systems are used almost exclusively by law enforcement, defense agencies, and other public sector organizations. AFIS technology is also applied to face recognition, for example, where scanners are used to check whether passengers attempting to board an airplane are wanted by authorities.

Biometric technologies for authentication are of greater interest to business. With biometric authentication, a “one-to-one” matching process is used in which a physical or behavioral characteristic is used to verify identity rather than (or in addition to) passwords or hardware tokens. Building access cards can be replaced with biometric systems, as can network passwords. Biometric systems currently in commercial use include fingerprint recognition, face recognition, iris recognition, retina recognition, signature recognition, and hand geometry.

The Biometrics Market

According to the International Biometric Group, a security consultancy and systems integrator, biometric revenues are expected to grow from $399 million (in 2000) to about $2 billion by 2005. The public sector, mainly law enforcement and defense, are currently the major consumers of both categories of biometric technologies. However, IBC expects this to change, with revenues attributable to large-scale public sector biometric usage, currently 70% of the biometric market, dropping to under 30% by 2005. Much of the growth will be attributable to PC/Network Access and e-Commerce applications, although large-scale public sector deployments will continue to be an essential driver of industry growth.

Estimates for 2001 show that finger-scan continues to be the leading biometric technology in terms of market share, commanding nearly 50% of non-AFIS biometric revenue. Facial-scan, with 15.4% of the non-AFIS market, surpasses hand-scan, which had been second to finger-scan in terms of revenue generation. IBG predicts that finger-scan and biometric middleware will emerge as two critical technologies for the desktop, together comprising approximately 40% of the biometric market by 2005.

A Few of the Players

Many biometrics providers are targeting physical access applications, particularly in aviation. SecuGen, a Milpitas company, recently won a contract with O’Hare Airport to fit all security doors with fingerprint scanners, eliminating the need for magnetic-stripe cards and readers. All 55,000 of O’Hare’s current employees will be required to register their fingerprints for use with the system.

Sagem Morpho, a Tacoma, Washington-based division of Paris-based Sagem, previously concentrated on forensic applications and AFIS, but recently decided to pursue commercial markets. The company's ability to perform a fast "one to many" match, where the system can match a single fingerprint against a database of ten million—a key competitive advantage in the AFIS market—is its strongest offering in the authentication market. Algorithms for accuracy and speed that it has been able to develop in high-volume matching applications are applicable to high-volume data traffic, or to physical access in high-traffic areas with large numbers of employees.

Other providers are focusing on the mainstream enterprise computing market. Precise Biometrics is marketing a product in which users receive a card keyed to a specific fingerprint, and can only access the system when the card is inserted into a connected reader and the finger is concurrently placed on the scanner. Companies like Iridian are marketing similar products that use iris-scanning technologies rather than fingerprint recognition.

Large, established companies have also entered the biometrics markets. Infineon’s Biometrics division offers security products and services with biometrics. The company has pushed to make biometric technologies mainstream since it developed the capacitive fingerprint-scanning sensor in 1997. Motorola produces biometric solutions through its Printrak division.

Opening doors by looking into a box or touching a keypad is no longer the stuff of science fiction. If vendors can create accurate and reliable products, and actually get mainstream businesses to buy them, we may never have to remember—or jot on a scrap of paper—another password. You can simply be your password.

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