Banks keep making banking easier, and that means cutting down on branch visits or eliminating them altogether by giving customers really great mobile apps. Perhaps more than any type of business, banking and financial services firms increasingly rely on the sophistication and ease-of-use of their mobile applications to attract new customers and keep them. They [...]
It’s the time of year for new notebooks, sneakers, backpacks, and also new schoolteachers. Most of those new teachers will be subject to background checks. Fingerprint searches have been used for decades to screen new employees in a variety of careers, including nursing, policing, banking, transportation, and education. In the US, employers in these fields [...]
Facial recognition is here to stay for mobile authentication. It’s fast, easy, and familiar to anyone who has taken a selfie. And thanks to the universal appeal of the selfie, even lower-cost mobile handsets just about now have a front-facing camera. This is important because it means that biometrics can be used to strengthen the [...]
Biometrics are the heir to the password for the reign of secure authentication. There are good reasons for that; our biometrics are naturally unique to us and could hardly be more convenient. They will enable strong authentication to become a seamless, transparent process that make login easier and more secure. But there are different ways [...]
In Part One of this series, we looked at the topic of government and commercial organizations being hacked. Gaining access to our personal information is the objective of these breaches, and despite massive investments in anti-hacking technology there seems no end in sight. With that vicious cycle in mind, perhaps it’s time to make the [...]
2015, according to the Chinese zodiac calendar, was the year of the sheep. In reality, though, it turned out to be the year of the hack. T-Mobile. ScottTrade. Ashley Madison. Even the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM). All were victims of cyber hacking in 2015, and the personally identifiable information (PII) of millions was [...]
“Fido” in Latin translates as “to trust”, but it more commonly evokes thoughts of man’s most loyal companion. Abraham Lincoln had a dog named Fido, and among the most recognized (non-fictional) dogs in history was named Fido. He was a street dog that became famous in Italy in the 1950s for unwavering loyalty to his [...]
The proliferation of digital cameras and facial images has made facial biometrics extremely useful for criminal investigations, and increasingly so for identity applications beyond law enforcement. As with fingerprints, the use of facial biometrics needs to meet certain criteria to make them admissible in court or for whatever legal basis might be required. In these [...]
In talk about large-scale biometric systems, we hear a lot about algorithm performance: speed, accuracy, template size, false accept and reject rates, ROC and DET curves, etc. These are critical to knowing if a biometric algorithm is up to the task at hand. But we hear less about how these systems achieve their massive scale; [...]
It is plainly evident that border management is essential to containing illegal immigration, international crime, and terrorism. But implementing effective border control measures while minimizing the impact of security on lawful travel and commerce is extraordinarily difficult and expensive; a herculean task. While management of travel through international airports requires substantial infrastructure and staffing, management [...]
