| Title | Biometrics & Its Threats |
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Dr. Suneeta Agarwal Professor and Head, Computer Science and Engineering Department, Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad, India Email: suneeta@mnnit.ac.in |
Suneeta Agarwal is a Professor and Head of the Computer Science and Engineering department , Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad, India. She received BSc ,MSc & M.Tech(CS) degrees in 1973, 1975 and 2007 respectively. She did Ph.D from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1980. So far she has guided five Ph.D students and seventy M.Tech students Eight Ph.D students are working with her at present. She has 33 years of teaching experience in the institute.
She has worked on development of robotics project sponsored by Ministry of Human Resources , Government of India. She is a member of professional bodies like IEEE, Indian Society of Technical Education (ISTE), New Delhi, and Computer Society of India (CSI). She has published a series of research papers on computer vision and image understanding, combinatorics, algorithm design, neural networks,data compression,operations research areas at reputed international journals and conferences. Apart from many national conferences she has presented her research papers in Georgia, Capetown, Singapore and Hongkong. In Singapore she has been awarded best research paper also.
Abstract
Due to enormous growth in identity frauds in our society, identity establishment has become a challenging task nowadays. Therefore, automatic person identification is needed in a wide range of applications such as: automatic teller machines, cellular phones, travel documents, airport and border entry control, electronic banking, finance and medical applications and most importantly countering terrorists’ threats. Three basic ways to establish the identity of a person are, “something you carry” (e.g., ID card, physical key) and “something you know” (e.g., password, personal identification number (PIN)and “something you are” (e.g., fingerprint, face, voice). Passwords are difficult to remember and must be changed frequently and also can be easily guessed. I.Card may also be lost or shared. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly apparent that “something you know (knowledge-based)” and “something you carry (token-based)” mechanisms alone are not reliable for identity establishment and therefore stronger authentication schemes based on “something you are”, namely biometrics are needed. Biometrics deals with identifying individuals with help of their biological data.
Physical Biometric Traits are related to the shape of the body. Behavioural Biometric Traits are related to the behaviour of a person such as signature ,Voice, gait while Chemical/Biological Biometrics deals with Skin spectroscopy DNA and blood-glucose.
In spite of numerous advantages of biometrics-based personal authentication systems over traditional security systems, they are vulnerable to attacks that can decrease their security considerably. There are nine types of possible attacks. Fingerprint scanning is the most common method of the biometric methods available today. The security of fingerprint scanners has however been questioned and studies have shown that fingerprint scanners can be fooled with artificial fingerprints, i.e. copies of real finger prints. Now researchers are working on liveness detection based on some life signs e.g. Temperature of the epidermis, Pulse, Perspiration and Texture. Liveness detection (sometimes called vitality detection) means to detect the presence of a live person by using some physiological information as life signs.
Real fingers exhibit perspiration phenomenon whereas spoof fingers do not. Hence, difference in perspiration information of two successive fingerprint images of a person taken in a certain interval can be used as a liveness measure. No of researchers are working on this area.
