How accurate are biometrics?
The immutable truth about security: There is no such thing as 100% secure. This includes biometric authentication systems that do not perform at 100% accuracy, no matter what some marketers might suggest. The authentication process described above involves a one-to-one comparison between the stored, reference bioprint and the newly supplied bioprint of an individual seeking access to a system. It can produce two types of errors: false acceptance (also known as false match); and false rejection (also called false non-match). False acceptance occurs when the biometric system incorrectly accepts the bioprint of an imposter as a valid user. A false rejection error occurs when the bioprint of an authorized individual is categorized as that of an imposter and rejected. Most vendors report accuracy performance in the upper 90 percentile — findings generally obtained from internal testing performed with co-operative users. Some third-party testing is available, but application designers shoul
