LEGIC, manufacturer of contactless smart card systems, aims to show at the Securex 2002 exhibition how its technology can work with biometrics products.
Recent reports in the press of tests conducted on biometrics products, such as iris and finger print readers, have shown a certain degree of vulnerability of such systems, LEGIC say. Particularly low-price products could be ‘fooled’ by simple means, such as presenting an ink-jet printed image of the user’s eye to the iris reader, which was sufficient to get authorisation to, for example, log into a computer network, according to LEGIC. While it would do injustice to generalise these findings to much more sophisticated high-end biometrics systems it underlined that biometrics, while clearly having its merits, cannot be seen as the ready-made single solution for all security problems, LEGIC claim. Rather, the firm says, biometrics is an important part in a chain of logical links to verify a user and subsequently grant or deny access. Hence the firm argues, particularly in high-security applications, biometrics readers are used with smart cards.
Template storage
Templates, which is to say, the user’s biometrics data, such as his finger print, can be stored on LEGIC smart cards. This offers a higher-level verification as the user is not only being verified by the reader of the biometrics terminal but also needs to present his personal smart card at the terminal. The LEGIC reader then reads the template from the card and compares it to the previously scanned finger, iris or facial data. This procedure makes tampering at the biometrics reader useless as without presenting the required smart card with the stored biometrics template in its memory, verification will fail and access be denied, LEGIC say. Visit LEGIC’s stand SA 13 at Securex 2002 at Earls Court 2, London, from October 22 to 24. Visit www.legic.com
