Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Fingerprint web authentication: it's exciting

The news about fingerprint web autentication is very exciting. The implications are enormous: it will change the way we treat Internet security.

Why? because password security is a joke. Not only that you can lose it, or that someone can steal it from you (mostly using "Forgot your password?" mechanisms), but you can hand it for somebody else to log-in for you. Which means that nobody trusts no one: you don't trust the system, and the system doesn't trust you.

Online Voting

One application of this is online voting: so far, no one was serious about electing government officials over the Internet. But, with mounting accusations of rigged votes in the most democratically advanced western governments, maybe establishing an online, fingerprint-based voting system is the democratic way to go. Whether rigged votes occured or not, the possibility that this could happen is enormous. The test for it is simple: does the average person on the street know who counts the votes? did he meet and speak to them? My bet is 99.9% of people are quite oblivious.

Online Banking

This is easier to relate to: we all bank online. There's simply not enough time to visit our banker all the time, and in Canada, you can turn into an ice cube half way down the road to the nearest bank.

But protect bank accounts by password? Are you kidding? I don't know the bank fraud statistics off the top of my head, but they're huge. eMarketer released a study indicating that 29% of Americans want fingerprint biometrics implemented for logging into bank websites.

N-Tegrity makes life a little safer by allowing you to connect to a your bank website in one click through the fingerprint protected password manager, which allows for much more complicated and hard to guess passwords. At the same time, n-Surf is the most compelling technology right now, and promises a real fingerprint-reliant techonology for logging in. Banks should implement it.

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