Fingerprinting The Future

In the New Year, the "new you" may face a host of challenges — among them, a host of "new yous" vying to hijack your hard-earned identity. How will you keep them out of your finances, your computer, and your life? The tools and technology to protect your good name are already here, and San Diego companies are leading them to market.

The first wave of biometric readers has already exploded in the consumer market, protecting laptops, home safes, and point-of-sale purchases, and is being developed for secure firearms and automobile entry. When social security numbers and other personal data are constantly being sold, hacked, or lost, biometric technology — which compares physical data against recorded data to insure a match — offers greater security, because it’s so much harder to fake than a password.

Because of its economy, biometric security has edged out other bio-scanning modes, from keystroke monitoring and signature analysis to retinal scanning and biomatrix palm reading sensors.

"Software is software," says Tx Systems operations director Jason Wimp. "It’ll be priced at whatever the market will bear. The hardware is more of a fixed cost, and if you have to support an optical scanner, it goes up." Less invasive than a light in your eye, biometric reading still makes some uneasy, since users must give up their fingerprint data. To soothe wary holdouts, Wimp says, "We go back to what the customer is already familiar with." Smart cards caught on because they improved on the credit and ATM cards in every wallet. "Anybody who has a driver’s license has been fingerprinted, so this is nothing new." Wimp admits that some have apprehensions about the technology — "’I don’t want to give Big Brother my fingerprint’" — but the data collected is already on file elsewhere, and less volatile than a PIN number. "People have come to accept it as a vehicle for authenticating oneself."

But is the data really safe? "When you swipe your fingerprint at a store," Wimp says, "it’s calling a database somewhere on a server, so you’re trusting that they’re using a secure socket layer or 128-bit encryption, like on a Web site." A smart card holds the data and has a CPU to judge a match for itself, so there’s no vulnerability to interception. Even if that faceless "new you" out there hacked your fingerprint template, they would have to replace it in the database with their own.

Three tiers of readers are in use, with a host of authentication tactics. The simple capacitive sensor is similar to the buttons on your microwave, capturing an image of the whorls of the fingerprint and matching them against a file. A more perceptive swipe sensor makes a subdermal scan, mapping the unique points that comprise the fingerprint. The most complex biometric readers use an optical scanner to compare against an encrypted template on a smart card.

Wimp started Zone Development in San Diego in 1997 to write smart card software and distribute German Towi-Toko smart card readers. Acquired by SCM Microsystems in 2000, Zone was later spun off and renamed Tx Systems, and moved into the biometric field, providing software for fellow San Diegans ImageWare and Titan.

"The technologies really marry well together," Wimp observes. "We provide the SDK (software development kit) to companies like ImageWare and Titan, who integrate them into their products." Tx also offers a line of Windows-friendly consumer biometric readers that plug into a PC or laptop.

Since 1996, ImageWare Systems has honed biometrics to make life harder for the bad guys, who get to try it out when they get arrested. Police and sheriffs’ departments use their technology to book arrestees and check with other jurisdictions for priors.

ImageWare CEO James Miller describes the boon this has meant for law enforcement. "In the old days, if I was arrested and booked, there would be a paper record and a picture stapled to the file." Booking and background checks now take moments in a squad car, instead of downtown. "With a keystroke," Miller says, photos and prints "can be sent across a desk, or across an ocean." Photos can be matched digitally against millions of photo records, and even against digital composite sketches, another innovation ImageWare pioneered. "In solving crime, time is absolutely a factor. It increases the ability to instantly share information."

ImageWare’s comprehensive ID-management software has been used in driver’s licenses in 38 states, and in passports and national ID cards from Mexico and Costa Rica to Uganda and Singapore. ImageWare is currently testing a biometric visa for Canada.

Here at home, resistance persists to biometric data in a national ID card, which can protect and vindicate in the right hands, more than it could oppress in the wrong ones. The controversial national ID card, which many cite as a sign of totalitarianism, is common everywhere else in the world, but Miller sees the addition of biometric data to driver’s licenses, already common abroad, as the familiar angle that will ease consumers into acceptance. "When you get a driver’s license," he says, "you get fingerprinted, and you get your picture taken. So you’ve got the two biometrics there, that are standard, anyway." — Cody Goodfellow