Biometric Security Technology: Modalities, Uses & Selection

A biometric measures a person's unique physical or behavioural characteristics to verify or identify them. Unlike a password it cannot be forgotten or easily lent, but it also cannot be changed if compromised. Systems use biometrics for two purposes: verification (is this who they claim to be?) and identification (who is this?).

Physical traits include fingerprints, hand geometry, retina, iris and face; behavioural traits include signature, voice, keystroke dynamics and gait.

Biometrics were first used for physical access to secure rooms and buildings and remain common there. Today they also unlock phones, authorise payments, support passkeys, verify identities remotely for onboarding, and identify travellers and citizens at borders and in national identity programmes.

Choose on accuracy (false accept and false reject rates), resistance to spoofing, user acceptance, cost, environment and enrolment effort, and on how templates are stored and protected. Prefer systems tested against independent benchmarks and certified for presentation attack detection.

Active areas are liveness and deepfake detection, multimodal fusion, on-device and privacy-preserving matching, cancelable templates, fairness across demographic groups, and regulation of biometric identification such as the EU AI Act and India’s data protection law.

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