Forwarded From: Nicholas Charles Brawn <ncb05@uow.edu.au>
04Aug98 AUSTRALIA: COMPUTERS - WHEN IT COMES TO SECURITY, THE EYES HAVE IT.
By John Davidson.
The world's largest maker of automatic teller machines, NCR, yesterday
took the wraps off an ATM capable of scanning a customer's eyeballs, which
could lead to a new generation of self-service financial products. The
ATMs, already deployed in a trial in the United Kingdom, were showcased at
a conference in Sydney yesterday. They read the iris of anyone standing at
the machine and match it with a database of customers to identify the
user.
Like fingerprints, the human iris is highly individual - even varying
between left and right eye - and does not change over a lifetime. This
makes iris-recognition technology ideal for security systems. Mr Dan
Milton-Hine, the general manager of Self Service for NCR's Financial
Solutions Group, said the additional level of security afforded by iris
recognition, as opposed to PINs, enabled banks to offer high-value
transactions such as stocks and bonds, and even airline tickets, through
ATMs.
The technology comes at a time when other advances in ATM technology are
opening the way for further diversification of banking products.
High-quality colour printers, capable of printing such things as postage
stamps, could see ATMs become the self-service focus of a number of
previously unrelated goods and services.
Even ordinary banking would be simplified, because the iris scanner,
sitting just above the ordinary ATM screen, took only two seconds to
identify someone and was quicker than a PIN-based system, Mr Milton-Hine
said.
Iris recognition is expected to make big inroads into internet commerce,
too, as a means of securing the weakest link in existing security systems
- the user's PC.
Although the digital signatures used in internet security systems such as
SET are considered secure for the internet leg of the transaction, experts
have questioned just how secure the overall system can be if the bank does
not know for sure who is sitting at the PC and invoking the signature.
-o-
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Received on Wed Aug 5 20:57:32 1998