University of Carleton at Ottawa researchers are looking into whether brainwaves might be added to fingerprints and retinal scans as a way to make biometric security work. Read more about Julie Thorpe’s research on pass-thoughts (a twist on passwords) as well as a Wired News write-up of the Carleton work.
Also recently on the biometrics front, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is pushing for advanced fingerprint technologies that can be used to secure networks and computers. It recently finished a test with 14 vendors in which it showed what it is calling a speedier and less storage-intensive way to swap fingerprint data among different readers. Read more about this biometrics test here.
Others on the fingerprint front include the University of Buffalo, which has researched the best size for a keypad sensor and how big a fingerprint image needs to be to make it useful.
Bob Brown, bbrown@nww.com
