i3 - March/April 2016 - 12

BY SUSAN SCHREINER

C4 T R E N DS
THE NEW MAGIC
OF BIOMETRICS
Remember Tom Cruise in the Mission
Impossible movie, using physical attributes such as fingerprints, handprints,
retinal scans, voice print and facial
recognition to secure access to highly
protected locations? This is biometrics
in action-and for those concerned
about security, this is one of the next
big things.

MARCH/APRIL 2016

TRAVEL
For those who travel abroad
and are registered users of the
Global Online Enrollment System (GOES), the verification card
whisks you to a kiosk upon your
re-entry to the U.S. to eliminate
standing in line. Your identity is
embedded in the chip in your
passport along with your digital
photo, and contains your preregistered retina and finger sensor verifications. Given concerns
about terrorism, facial recognition technology will be rolled
out at U.S. airports for foreign
visitors and U.S. citizens, starting
this year following a successful pilot at Washington Dulles
International Airport in 2015. This
expansion began in January at
John F. Kennedy International
Airport in NYC. The technology
confirms the identity of travelers
with electronic passports and
is part of the DHS Science and
Technology Directorate's Apex
Air Entry and Exit Re-Engineering
project, designed to increase
safety, screen travelers entering the U.S., and confirm the
departure of non-U.S. citizens
from airports.

dows Hello. Windows 10 comes with
built-in biometric authentication, found
in Surface Pro tablets and SurfaceBook,
for instance. And Huawei, with its first
venture in the U.S., the Honor X5, is
including fingerprint biometrics in midrange smartphones starting at $200. As
component manufacturers like Huawei
drive down the physical material cost,
this feature will be included in lower cost
smartphones in 2016.
A Broader Tech Ecosystem
Because of declining costs, expect to
see shifts from authentication via swipe
technologies and passwords-to fingerprint sensors. Technology companies
like Fingerprint Cards (FPC), with a
strong customer base in China, and
Samsung-supplier Synaptics-vied for
second place based on unit shipments
in 2015-with FPC leading Synaptics in
2015 revenues at $316 million.
Synaptics showed its IronVeil biometric security technology for desktop
PCs incorporated in its Thermaltake
Black V2 mouse at CES 2016. IronVeil
brings biometrics to the desktop or
laptop, and is also looking at the gaming market since gamers make numerous micro-transactions requiring lots of
passwords.
Companies like Qualcomm and
I T I S I N N O VAT I O N

Dave and Les Jacobs/Getty Images; PASIEKA/Getty Images; lestyan4/Thinkstock

With most transactions and communications
occurring online, the scope, scale and frequency of
mass data breaches, brute force attacks against Web
properties and identity fraud with attacks against
user accounts is escalating. Weak passwords are part
of the authentication problem, so is there a solution
to this accelerating threat? What's the mechanism
to securely login to an ecommerce, banking or social
media website, or verify a traveler's identity?
How often have you misspelled your password,
forgot it or gotten locked-out in a world that
requires you to remember numerous complex passwords, and use multiple factors of authentication
like an SMS message on various mobile devices?
People are looking for authentication techniques
that rely on measurable physical characteristics
that can be automatically checked, like analysis of
fingerprints and facial characteristics like retinas.
Enter biometrics and the world as portrayed in
Mission Impossible.
Apple acquired fingerprint sensor maker
Authentec in 2012 and led the fingerprint sensor
market in 2015, due to the popularity of its iPhone
6S and iPad product lines. But the table is being set
for greater competition among platforms this year.
Signs that this nascent technology is heating up
were evident at CES 2016.
Fingerprint sensors have been a must-have new
feature on higher-end smartphones-like the latest iPhones. And now fingerprint security has also
become more common on the Android ecosystem
with the release of the Nexus 5X and 6P, and the
launch of the Marshmallow Android 6.0 software
platform, which has native biometric support.
Windows has jumped in with Microsoft's Win-

https://www.qualcomm.com/

i3 - March/April 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of i3 - March/April 2016