Today the protection of everything has become an important issue that affects ev eryone.

Whether it s protecting a cashier s cash drawer or preventing a suicide bomb er onto an aircraft. Either way there is going to be an increase and change in s ecurity. The advancement in the technology of computers has made it easier for p eople to get information. Today, a person can log onto the internet and view inf ormation on anything and everything. If an average person can do that then how s ecure is the internet? How much security should be placed on a computer or a web site? For the average person, a password, personal identification number, or key s allow them to view information that only they can access. This form of securit y isn t of high-quality because it can be forged. Over the years, many people have developed security systems that can actually au thenticate a person. This report will be looking at these advancements as well a s my thoughts of them. The improvement in security was developed on the bases of biometrics. Biometrics refers to the authentication techniques that rely on measurable characteristics that can be automatically checked. [1] Biometric techniques are divided into ph ysiological and behavioral characteristics. Physiological characteristics includ e: the finger, palm, the face, and the retina and iris of the eye. Behavioral ch aracteristics include: voiceprints, keystrokes and handwritten signatures. Fingerprints is the most commonly use of biometric today. It works great for the population between the ages of 18 and 40 because their prints are haven t been ef fective by normal aging. In my view there are a few downfalls. The first on is d ue to aging. As we go through life our body changes. We lose fat on a fingers ca using the image to become more difficult to read. The second one is due to the t ype of employment. A construction worker or a carpenter work with their hands al l the time. Many of them get injuries on their hands causing a scar to alter the fingerprint. My final downfall is a bit distorted. A finger can be cut off. The re are many people that will go to any means to get what they want. This include s cutting off a person finger and carrying it around till they get to what they need to access. Palm and hand scanner are less effective and more expensive then fingerprint sca nners. William W. Wilson believes that the US immigration will become the next b ig user of these products because they are 99.9 percent effective. Today hand sc anners are being used at the JFK, Toronto, Newark, and Miami airports. If you ar e enrolled into this program you d receive a card with a magnetic strip that airpo rt security swipes. Once travelers get the card and goes through the hand reader , they go through the passport control lines in a jiffy. Face recognition, in my opinion, seems to be the best form of security thus far in physiological biometrics. How it works is monitor manufacturers build camera lenses into the screens, and then a cranial blueprint is created. The program th at creates the blueprint was developed by Visionics Corp. of Jersey City, New Je rsey. This program takes measurements on the face such as the distance between t he eyes. Facial hair does not affect the image therefore any object on the face does not obscure the scanner and a perfect image comes out. Eye scanning is growing fast in the biometrics research. The equipment is more e xpensive than any other biometric security. The cost of the retina scanner is $5 ,000 and is extremely difficult to trick. Retinal scanning is effective because no two retinas and iris are the same. After scanning, the image is matched agains t a central database that determines if the person is that person. There are two negative aspects of retinal scanning. One is that the eye has to be two inches away from the machine. This will work when entering personnel only areas, but it doesn t work from a distance. The second is distorted once again. I saw it in a m ovie called Demolition Man. The year is something like 2025 and society is very ad vanced. A prisoner escapes from a high tech, extremely secured prison. He s able t

o escape by extracting the eye from the security guard and holding it up to the retinal scanner. Of course it opens the door. People will do anything they need to do in order to get what they want. According to research from John Daugman of Cambridge University, after 30 million tries with the retinal scanner, there ha s never been a false match. Overall physiological biometrics will work for the most part. All of them are a step forward in our security systems from entering restricted areas at airports to accessing restricted information on a computer. There seems to be a few bugs at can be worked out or improved in all of the biometrics researched above. Behavioral biometrics are leaning more to securing information on a computer. Vo ice Recognition isn t very secure but it is the second most secure method of biome trics. The downfall of it is that you have to train the software to your voice. Everyone sees voice recognition in cell phones. All you have to do is record the name when you say it. Then to dial it by voice you hold down a button and say t he name. I personally haven t had a good experience with it on my cell phone. I fo und that I can never say the name the way I recorded it. This is because of the emotions in the voice. We change the tone and pitch of our voice unconsciously t herefore the program may not work at all times. There are programs out there are designed specifically for computers. Veritel Co rp. s VoiceCrypt 2.01 centered on protecting files based on a persons own voicepri nt. The way this works is that the owner can only run programs that have their u nique voiceprint on it. Afterward the operator is asked by the program to answer five personal questions. So it has two security modes to be bypassed before act ual work or program is brought up. This seems to be a good solid security system to protect a computer system. It s difficult for the same person to say something the same way twice so it ll be more difficult for different person to duplicate i t. Keystrokes is a technique where the monitor recognizes the typing speed pattern. It uses the rhythm of how long a key is held down and the way your fingers are maneuvered around on the peripheral device called the keyboard. This to me seems like a full proof security system. No one can exactly match the rhythm of anoth er s fingers on the keyboard. Many questions have risen on the system which is why it s not commercially used. Many people question if a company might use this syst em to observe an employees work within a given amount of time . Hand written signatures are another solid form of security. Signatures are signe d on what s called a digitizing tablet. After signing, the signature is then sent to a program called Enterprise 2.0. This program then looks at the signature in multiple perspectives like the pressure on the pad, speed of it written, and the motion of the pen. Did you know that you can build secrets into your signature? According to this article by Norman Desmarais you can. By building secrets it m akes it completely impossible for forgery. All the biometrics we looked at can prevent unauthorized users to access your co mputer. Most of the physiological biometrics are more likely to be ineffective. Behavioral biometrics are more effective because of the difficulty to duplicate a signature, do the exact keystrokes as another person and replicate and exact v ersion of a voice. The cost of these security features can be inexpensive but th ey can be costly like the retinal scanner at $5000.

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