Passwords at your fingertips

New breakthroughs in Biometrics at UB, researchers say, are bringing us closer to accessing everything in our lives by fingerprint.

From cell phones to computers, bank accounts, and the internet, commercial industries are looking forward to the day when they can install fingerprint recognition sensors into the products they sell resulting in heightened levels of security for consumers.

"The bank, your computer, almost every Web site you go to asks for a username and password. It becomes hard to remember all of them, and you end up repeating a lot of them. As a result you compromise security because if someone cracks one, they can get to a lot," said Venu Govindaraju, Ph.D., UB professor of computer science and engineering and director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors. "Biometrics will be the future of security."

As devices such as cell phones get smaller so must the sensor that goes on them so only part of the fingerprint can be captured. Another advance that the researchers made was to calculate a minimum surface area that can be captured to provide the security equivalent of a six-character password. The fingerprints are translated to a string of numbers that correspond to a number of features of the image. Then, that number is what responds to the fingerprint.

Another advance that has been made is in the area of password security. When a password is given to a credit card company, they don't store that password anywhere but rather take the number and put it through a number of functions resulting in a "garbled string," Govindaraju said.

"As a concept it's wonderful, you can store some garbled string but until now there has been no actual practical implications for this," said Govindaraju. "What we have demonstrated for the first time is that you can actually do this quite efficiently."

WRUB, the student-operated radio station run by Sub Board, I inc., has installed two of these biometric locks on their office and broadcast booth doors. Because the technology is unavailable, fingerprints are stored in the more basic way.

"Most of the staff is very excited about it. They all think we are going to be cool like James Bond and were excited to see the new door system at work," said Stacy Dupuis, WRUB general manager.

According to Dupuis, however, there are some WRUB members who are less than enthused about the high-tech door locks.

"We have had a few complaints about whether this new system will cause identity theft," Dupuis said. "But I assure you this is not the case. The system is completely safe and the information is very under control."