Banks faced with the challenge of authenticating their customers online and facilitating secure payments are looking to biometric technologies such as fingerprint authentication for reliability. In November 2003, for instance, United Banker’s Bank, aware that its customers are other banks, began rolling out a fingerprint-based authentication solution, U.are.U Online, from DigitalPersona, in place of smart cards or tokens. Once UBB had integrated its Web site and internal systems with the U.are.U Online solution, its customers were able to log into the web site without a password or using the bank’s dial-in network.
On the basis that biometrics are more secure than cards or tokens, which can be appropriated by other parties, UBB bought one U.are.U Online system for each of its customers to catalyze adoption of the solution, according to Bank Systems Online. Some customers needed convincing that their fingerprints would not be stored in a database, but UBB has found the solution to protect its online transactions, and ultimately, its good name. Graduate researchers at UCLA are also developing a portable keychain device, the ThumbPod, to authenticate financial transactions online and potentially prevent credit card fraud.
With a view to validating the link between a credit card and its holder, the ThumbPod researchers believe that local banks could, for example, offer the device to their customers. Intending users of ThumbPod have a picture taken of their thumbprint, which is encrypted into the ThumbPod unit for correlation by the system. Despite the challenge of micro-processing users’ thumbprints, ThumbPod has a false accept rate of 0.01 per cent and a false reject rate of less than 1 per cent. If ThumbPod does take off, its originators predict that the system could be used for other authentication functions such as entry to a motor vehicle.
(ePaynews.com)