Q&A feature: trends in Biometrics

Biometric authentication, where physical characteristics like fingerprints or iris recognition are used to establish identity, is a rapidly growing area of development. The Engineer caught up with some leading voices in the sector to find out the latest trends, as well as gauging how the technology stacks up against traditional authentication methods.

Mohammed Murad - vice president, global sales and business development, Iris ID

Dr Sarah Morris - senior lecturer in digital forensics at Cranfield University

Tugberk Duman - biometrics expert and head of innovation at Futurice

SM: In digital forensics, one of the big things we are always asked is “who was at the keyboard?” This has often been a question we have not been able to answer as we can say what the digital device was doing, and what user interaction occurred, but often had no definitive way of linking that to a person. Biometrics such as facial recognition and fingerprint locks are therefore very exciting to us. They enable us to start to identify who was likely at the keyboard as their biometric data allowed access to the device, and therefore give us more information in an investigation.