Following on from the news this morning on Apple’s iPhone 5S being hacked, David Lowrence, a Retail Industry Consultant at Fujitsu, gave us his thoughts on the story.
"News around the hacking of the iPhone 5S will undoubtedly hinder the march of biometrics (and other Apple technologies) in the short term, with consumers showing concern around the impact on their lives of the technology. However, while the concern is justified, now Apple has legitimised a biometrics approach, there are other techniques that are more secure which can now come in to play. The one that stands out is palm vein, or finger vein technology, which look at characteristics of the vein itself; these do not change from birth to death and are unique to an individual.
"Palm vein technology is already proven; it is used for access in secure environments (such as hospitals) and is touch free. It is currently being used for financial transactions at ATM’s in Turkey and there is a plan in pilot stage to implement a programme to register the palm vein prints of every individual in Turkey for Government and welfare accreditation."
In August, Fujitsu claimed to have have developed the first authentication technology to extract and match 2,048-bit feature codes from palm vein images, and it aims to commercialise the technology by 2015.
Mr Lowrence concluded:
"While we don’t expect it to happen overnight, biometric verification of identity on a personal device will, in one way or another, become a standard identification process. In the future we will all be our own identifiers, so we won’t have to rely on something being provided by someone else (such as a card)."
