The technology for security measures has recently expanded to biometrics.  Biometrics is how computers identify a person based upon their intrinsic characteristics like iris, voice, face, writing, and fingerprint.  Fingerprint security is probably the most widely used type of biometrics and it recognizes the person for who he/she is rather than what they are carrying or what they know.

Using someone’s fingerprint for security purposes makes it impossible for anyone else to have access.  You can't steal a fingerprint so there is no way for anyone to gain access besides the person with the right fingerprint.

Analysis of fingerprints is a 100 year old science.  It is the most efficient and economical way to identify a person.  The fingerprint security market holds over 60% of the biometric market throughout the world.  Fingerprints were most widely known to convict or identify wrong doers.  Today we use fingerprint security for many things including cars, cell phones, pda's, computers, locks, and much more.

The reason we can use fingerprints is because each person has their own unique print.  Each print contains characteristics called minutiae.  The minutiae is the visible aspects of the fingerprints like ridges, ridge endings, and bifurcations.  They use these measurements of the unique characteristics to distinguish if a fingerprint matches or not.

The most common ways to scan a fingerprint are optical and capacitance scanning.  The finger is scanned and then a gray-scale image is captured.  Then a special computer analyzes the picture and displays a template of the finger.  That template and the different points on the template are what the scanners scan for.  In a sense it is like a very large and complicated password.

There are two different processes that fingerprint recognition technology falls into.   The first is the verification process.  This process requires the user to state who he or she is and if the fingerprint matches, the user is verified as who he or she says they are.

The second is the identification process.  This process does not require the user to state their name.  A fingerprint is taken or gathered and then compared with a database of people who have already given a scan of their fingerprint.  Once a match is found, the user is then identified.

Fingerprint security is a complicated process that appears to be quite simple.  The computer hardware and software that goes into fingerprint security technology is all state of the art equipment.  I imagine we will see this form of security to be more widely used across the world and similar forms of high tech security to follow.