Identification, Verification, Authentication, Authorization

People who are not in the field of security or biometrics often do not understand the difference between identification, verification, authentication and authorization systems. These systems differ considerably and depending on the system you need, there could be a huge price difference.

Biometric Identification System

Identification means you don’t know anything about the person and you are trying to identify them, e.g., you go to a party, someone comes up and says, “hi”. What do you do? You look at the person’s face, and try to recognize them. The same process happens in the biometric identification solution.

Let’s say, you have pictures of all the users in the database. Now, someone comes up to you and says “Hi”, what you will do? You will take a picture of this person and feed it to your biometric system. The biometric system will compare this picture with all the pictures that are in database and returns the information of that person, whose photograph is the closest match. This is also called 1:N matching, where the biometric system is comparing 1 picture with all the pictures in the database.

In this example, we have used the face recognition technology to identify a person, but we can use fingerprint, iris, voice or any other biometric technology …

For those who think fingerprints are unique

Whenever I meet a new client, I always get asked the question, “Are fingerprints unique?” and before I can reply someone else replies, “Yes, they are absolute unique, I have heard that even the twins fingerprints are not similar and neither the fingerprints of two fingers of the same hand.”

While I agree with the answer, I am not sure about the accuracy of  “Yes, they are absolutely unique”  part.  The reason is that we are about 6 billion of us. Assume that all 6 billion people have 10 fingers, that would make 60 billion fingerprints! Nobody has collected 60 billion fingerprints, matched against one another and proved the uniqueness! Does that mean that the fingerprints are not unique then? Well, no that would also be incorrect, because, fingerprints have been used for identification since  100 years now and we have yet to find 2 fingers with similar fingerprints. The correct answer to this question is:

The probability of 2 people having similar fingerprints is very low.

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Are Fingerprints Unique?

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