Speaking of technologies that are beginning to take off (last issue we looked at happenings around virtual directories), biometrics may be poised to finally claim its rightful place in the identity management world. It seems to me that it's been 10 years at least since I first wrote about biometrics being the "coming thing" that would make username/password authentication systems obsolete. It still could happen.

I read a news story last week that described the "most over-designed soda machine in the world." Evidently, a group of grad students at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) has modified a soda machine so that it dispenses drinks when you either authenticate with a fingerprint or "smile for the camera" with a facial recognition system. You also choose your beverage via a touchscreen display. Check out the project where you'll find a flow chart of the logic and a nine-page white paper on how the project developed, including the methodology of the system:

"Using a mounted camera, the system is trained on users faces, which are added to the repository. Recognition requires detecting a face, morphing the face, running pre-processing on the face, looking up the face in the repository, running an election over many frames, and finally logging in the user with the most votes in the election."

There was other biometrics news last week that might just help you emulate the UCSD project - or develop a whole new project on your own. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has just released the Multimodal Biometric Application Resource Kit (MBARK), an open source middleware package that enables you to plug in biometric sensors from different manufacturers. The kit also contains templates and sample apps. All the details and the software can be downloaded from the NIST Web site.

NIST has been at the forefront (or, perhaps, at the back and pushing hard) of biometric development in the United States. It hosts the annual Biometric Consortium Conference, which is coming up next month in Baltimore.

Much of the biometrics drive comes at the behest of the Department of Homeland Security, the folks who run the US-Visit program as well as the ones urging the Department of State to implement the biometric passport.

If you are thinking about biometrics as an aid to, or replacement for, your current authentication scheme you should really look into MBARK, which provides all of these features and benefits:

* Provides a consistent user interface: A user-centered and consistent user interface reduces errors and minimizes the need to retrain users as vendors develop new sensors and software.

* Allows users to recover from mistakes: With MBARK, an operator not only easily recover from mistakes, but may also save a snapshot of a session (in the form of an XML file), and load it back up at a later time.

* Adjusts workflow automatically: Defining a workflow that accommodates mistakes becomes more complex as "edge cases" are added. For example, how should the system behave if a fingerprint sensor detects that a finger is missing, but the operator has not indicated such?

* Responds to user input: Users expect modern applications to be responsive to their input at all times during initialization, startup, capture, task editing, and so on. How does a user distinguish between a long-running operation and a system that is simply "frozen"? MBARK uses a natively multi-threaded architecture to allow as much "background" processing as possible.

* Provides true sensor interoperability: MBARK uses a plug-in style mechanism that allows true sensor interoperability based on a unified API - a common interface that has been used to successfully integrate real face cameras, fingerprint scanners and iris sensors. The MBARK architecture allows new sensors to be deployed without the need to even restart an MBARK application.

* Provides flexible user configuration: A highly configurable biometric client empowers users to define and experiment with various biometrics and workflows, without depending on any particular vendor to implement such changes. With XML files, MBARK allows users to define precise custom workflows specifically tailored to their needs.

* Open and free: MBARK source code is public domain.

It certainly seems like something you should take a look at.

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.