“Technology Must Be Like Oxygen: Ubiquitous, Necessary And Invisible”

- Chris Lehmann, Science Leadership Academy

Nowadays, almost every organization uses biometric authentication of their employees for the access to the organization. This biometric authentication to establish the identity of the employees is either in the form of fingerprints, facial scans, iris recognition, voice recognition etc. Biometric authentication in highly secured or sensitive environment is also used for access to computers or to confidential information/documents etc.

Biometric scanning device inputs the user data and converts it into digital information that is interpreted and verified by the computer. With advancements in technology, the biometric authentication has evolved to make it more secure. Among the many biometric authentication methods one of them is Vein Recognition; it is also called Vascular Biometric. This method relies on measuring the parts of individual’s circulatory system that is unique for each individual like finger prints. Optical scanning technique is used to obtain the vein images from palm, eyes or finger.

2D vein recognition system is already in use. It focuses mainly on the veins in the user’s hand as each person’s veins have unique physical and behavioral traits. But like any other 2D biometrics, 2D vein recognition has its own flaws and the most important one is that 2D biometric is easy to counterfeit. By using 3D biometrics an additional layer of security – structural information is added which adds to the security and is difficult to counterfeit.

3D vein recognition method in which an encryption technique to process biometric data recorded by 3D finger vein recognition has been developed by EPFL’s Security and Cryptography Laboratory along with startup Global ID. The novel recognition system uses homomorphic encryption in which the data is processed by scanner and identification mechanisms without decrypting it. Thus, there is no threat of counterfeit. In this way the stored biometric information is protected.

Such a system can be used for a plethora of applications. One such example is financial transactions at banks. 3D vein recognition system will help secure our bank accounts because of the unique traits in each individual’s veins and by using homomorphic encryption on top of it. Any financial transaction will be possible only if the veins match with the stored vein pattern in the system. Thus, 3D vein recognition system can be leveraged to deploy in wide variety of applications in order to protect sensitive and confidential information. Talking about the commercial products around vein recognition Fujitsu offers Vein Scanning Tablet and according to some of the stories published on the internet Apple could add vein recognition in Apple Watch.

By Ms. Parul Datta, Assistant Professor, CSE, Chitkara University, H.P.

References:-

• https://actu.epfl.ch/news/a-more-secure-biometric-authentication-system-2/
• http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/cse571-11/ftp/biomet/#sec3.5
• http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/tip/Biometric-authentication-know-how-Devices-systems-and-implementation