Fingerprints are a common form of biometric authentication and have been used by police forces around the world for more than 100 years to solve crimes. A British colonial magistrate in India is credited with the first official modern use of fingerprinting, on 28th July 1858.
That date was when Sir William Herschel began demanding fingerprints on civil contracts as a way of preventing signees from repudiating their signatures. It took another 34 years for an investigator in Buenos Aires to pioneer the use of fingerprint identification, known as dactyloscopy, to arrest a criminal.
Nowadays, fingerprints and other biometrics are found in all areas of life. Fingerprints have become a quick way to open smartphones and other consumer devices.
Biometrics are used in airports and border control systems. Facial recognition scans identify nationals and allow them to leave one country and enter another.
In other situations, this technology can open doors and give approved users access to high-level security areas. In homes, voice recognition is used to control heating, lighting and entertainment systems, and many of us use it to do rapid information searches.
Biometric security offers a number of benefits. It is not only fast and convenient but also almost impossible to replicate.
But just as passwords can be stolen, fingerprints and other biometric markers are also vulnerable to thieves for so-called "presentation attacks". Unlike passwords, however, they cannot be changed, giving cybercriminals permanent access to any computer or electronic device requiring biometric authentication.
International standards offer guidance based on industry best practices. Much of the work is carried out in the joint technical committee set up by IEC and ISO.
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 17 develops publications related to biometric technologies for cards and personal identification. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 focuses on cyber security, including biometric data protection techniques, biometric security testing, evaluations, and evaluation methodologies.
The standardization of generic biometric technologies to support interoperability and data interchange among applications and systems takes place in ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 37.
An SC 37 Technical Report provides guidance on estimating how "challenging" or "stressing" is an evaluation dataset for fingerprint recognition, based on relative sample quality, relative rotation, deformation, and overlap between impressions. In addition, it establishes a method for the construction of datasets of different levels of difficulty, as well as defining the relative level of difficulty of a fingerprint dataset used in the technology-related evaluation of fingerprint recognition algorithms.
(Source: IEC)
