Biometric Authentication

For years, biometric authentication has been seen in movies and television shows as a purely fictional piece of technology. However, in the past two decades, biometric authentication has become so common is it everywhere from phones, to computers, and even national digital based identification systems. There are still concerns about the privacy that this type of identification may lack. There are three major categories of authentication: what you know, what you have, and what you are. (See Figure 1). What you are is the category that biometric authentication falls into because it measures authentication through mainly physiological means; the most common being finger print and iris scans. Biometrics are favored because they are less likely to change; finger prints don’t change over time and neither do irises. For mobile phones, a simple four number password is easy to hack and even guess, creating very little privacy. Even with more complicated passwords, there is still the strong chance personal information, such as credit card …show more content…
In the recently released iPhone X, Apple has released a new Facial Recognition component to the smartphone. What is called Facial ID, can be used for everything that the Touch ID was used for because is supposed to be more secure. Apple has stated their design is extremely efficient at recognizing and remembering a face. It is supposed to be able to recognize the same person with different clothes on, a different hairstyle, and different lighting. They also tackled one of the biggest concerns when it comes to facial recognition: it will be able to tell the different between the correct face and someone who looks similar or even a photograph. So far the facial recognition software is only available in the iPhone X, but if what Apple claims is true, facial recognition will most likely become as common as the Touch ID in the next few