Simple Web Security

Being able to easily recognize people has never been a gift of mine.  Many times I’ve been stopped in a store, or on the street, by someone that knows me, and I scratch the inside of my head, trying to figure out how I should know this person.  Is she someone from church, is she the teller at the bank I always see, maybe the Subway sandwich artist?  I put on a forced smile, and say how nice it is to see her, and have a good day, and see you soon.  Oh, well.

Security, whether in our homes, schools, or our computer networks, is all about recognition.  Bank robbers, at least the smarter ones (if there is such a kind), try to disguise themselves so that they won’t be recognized from the surveillance footage.  Politicians, on the hand, want to be recognized, and, of course, re-elected next November.

Recognition is both an art and a science.  Humans have the amazing capacity to recognize each other through a complex processing of many sensory inputs.  From a person’s facial characteristics, tenor of the voice, and behavioral cues, we know who a person is.  Some of us are better at this than others, but it’s remarkable how good we really are at it.  The field of biometrics is all about automating the recognition process so that machines can do it based on pre-defined algorithms.  But algorithms aren’t particularly intuitive, and relying on computers to recognize us, whether through passwords or biometrics, will never be perfect.

Because we live in a digital wild west, we want our computer systems to recognize us before we impart any personal information or authorize a financial transaction.  Most often we do this with a user name and a password.  If the words we provide are recognized by the computer system, we’re in.  We could do the same thing with any number of attributes that are uniquely “ours”.  One of those is, of course, our fingerprint.  Computers can recognize us when we present a fingerprint because no one else has one like ours.  The cost of doing this has gone way down, and the accuracy of recognition has gone way up.  It’s no wonder that biometric recognition is quickly becoming a mainstream technology!

Tags: authentication, biometrics, it security

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 11:21 pm and is filed under protocol. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.