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| March 16, 2006
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Dear readers,
The Biometrics Info provides you with the latest news on biometrics, smartcards and network security. We provide you with this free service 2 or 3 times a week depending on the news available.
We provide a RSS feed for daily use. During the week all the news will be available through the RSS feed with a weekly summary on friday through the Biometrics Info e-zine.
We carefully selected the newsarticles for this Biometrics Info and we hope you appreciate this edition.
Enjoy reading.
Reinier M. van der Drift
BioXS
English
UK plans to make driving licences biometric
The British driving licence is to go biometric "at some stage" but, according to Transport Minister Alastair Darling, it will remain a distinct document from the planned UK identity card. Darling introduced the Road Safety Bill in the House of Commons this week, but said, "given that the same information will be required for both passports and driving licences, it makes sense to co-operate on them, but the two documents will be distinct".
The Register
Date: 2006-03-10 |
Implant ID chips called big advance, Big Brother
Doctors implanted a radio ID tag under Sean Darks' skin that allows the executive to enter restricted areas of his Ohio security company.
Jack Schmidig, the police chief in Bergen County, N.J., has a similar chip that doctors can use to find his medical records in an emergency.
And in a somewhat renegade use of the technology, Washington state entrepreneur Amal Graafstra unlocks his home and car and logs on to his computer using a chip he bought online and had implanted near his thumb.
SignOnSanDiego.com
Date: 2006-03-12 |
Car keys could soon to be a thing of the past
Hanover, Germany - Car keys could become obsolete in the not too distant future, according to Japanese technology concern Hitachi, which is working on a replacement system that recognizes the driver's veins.
Vein-pattern recognition technology is more reliable than fingerprint-based identification, which has already replaced ignition keys in some models, the company says. 'If the finger is dry, or is injured, it can be very difficult to recognise the print,' according to Hitachi's chief strategist for information technology and communications, Mitsuo Yamaguchi.
Biometrics gaining ground in Japan
Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC), the second largest Japanese banking group, is to use a biometrics system that reads the patterns of veins in the customer’s index finger. This customer identification system which has been in use in SMBC branches since mid-December 2005 will now be deployed in 1 100 “am/pm” convenience stores which are open 24 hours a day.
U.K. Lawmakers Support Blair Plan to Link ID Cards, Passports
March 14 (Bloomberg) -- Britain's House of Commons backed Prime Minister Tony Blair's plan to introduce national identity cards in a vote that would force anyone applying for a passport to register for the ID document at the same time.
Lawmakers in the House of Commons, the U.K.'s elected legislature, voted 310 to 277 in rejecting amendments by the unelected House of Lords that would have made the cards optional. The bill now goes back to the Lords to consider again.
Bloomberg
Date: 2006-03-14 |
Face recognition comes to photo albums
CARLSBAD, Calif.--Facial-recognition technology has been used by the FBI and law enforcement for years--but starting next week, start-up Riya will bring it to the living room.
The company, founded by a group of facial recognition Ph.D.s from Stanford University, has created a Web site that will search through digital photo albums through "contextual recognition" to find matches, co-founder Munjal Shah said during a presentation at PC Forum, a three-day conference taking place here. Give the Web site a couple of pictures of your mother-in-law as a sample, and it will find the other pictures of her on your hard drive.
Banking to drive chip card reader market - Frost & Sullivan
The largest potential growth in the smart card readers and chipsets market over the short term has to come in the form of migration to next-generation payment technology. EMV migration in Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America along with contactless payment in the United States is the most important application supporting the growth in the readers and chipsets market.
E-passports, national ID, driver's licenses and transit are also large markets for smart card readers in the medium term. The market opportunities from the government projects will grow tremendously in the medium term, which opens up numerous lucrative market opportunities.
Compulsory and centralised - UK picks hardest sell for ID cards
By using both compulsion and a central identity register in its ID card scheme the UK Government has opted for the combination least popular with the public, according to a study carried out by the Open University. The results of the study, Privacy Attitudes and the Acceptance of Identity Cards in the UK, are due to be published in the Journal of Information Science, and show increased levels of suspicion in the public over both of these key aspects to the ID scheme.
According to OU senior lecturer Dr Adam Joinson, who led the study, "The combination of compulsion with a centralised database led to significant drops in support for ID cards. When this scenario was presented, even those who had been categorised as 'privacy unconcerned' moved strongly against them.
The Register
Date: 2006-03-13 |
Biometrics unreliable, says EU privacy head
European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx criticized governments' fondness for biometrics to identify citizens and warned that greater interoperability of databases may have serious implications for people.
In response to a recent communication by the European Union on the interoperability of several databases, including the Visa Information System and Eurodac, Hustinx issued an opinion calling for a better analysis of the data protection implications.
Report: Biometrics Market to Triple to $1.4 Billion by 2008
SAN ANTONIO — A Frost & Sullivan analysis reports the North American biometric applications market is expected to rise to $1.4 billion by 2008, almost triple the $527 million generated in 2004.
While traditional fingerprint technologies currently make up the largest portion of market revenues, new technologies such as facial recognition and iris scans hold the greatest potential for expansion, Frost says. Frost & Sullivan research analyst Rob Allen said in a prepared statement that although the market would benefit from companies developing more than one biometric application, only 15 percent of the companies studied offered multiple types of biometric technologies.
Security Sales & Integration
Date: 2006-03-15 |
Biometric passports may be issued from 2007 - official
MOSCOW, March 15 (RIA Novosti) - Russia may start issuing passports with biometric data as early as 2007, the country's top migration official said Wednesday. "If the pilot project proves successful, the issue of such passports will begin in 2007," Federal Migration Service Konstantin Romodanovsky said. Biometric passports are currently being issued in Kaliningrad Region, an exclave of Russia on the Baltic Sea, and at a number of Russian embassies. The passports contain digitized data on their bearers and are harder to forge or falsify than regular papers. Deputy Interior Minister Alexander Chekalin said up to five million passports could be printed and issued annually. He added that 12 million biometric passports had been produced .
RIA Novosti
Date: 2006-03-15 |
National identity card to come with PIN number
The controversial new national identity card may come with a PIN number like existing bank cards.
The Home Office Minister, Andy Burnham, said a "chip and pin" style code number could be used to verify cardholders' identities in some cases, rather than fingerprints, face and iris scans which will be encoded in the card. Ministers have previously indicated that government departments, banks and other businesses would verify someone's identity by scanning their "biometrics" or by simply looking at the card. This would have required huge investment in biometric reading machines, for example at every doctor's surgery and benefits office, but the full cost has never been estimated by the Home Office.
Mr Burnham said: "A PIN number would be a new 'intermediate' way of checking a card was authentic.
"The verification services that could be offered would be applied appropriately according to the business process that was involved," he said.
24dash.com
Date: 2006-03-14 |
Poor authentication increases risk of identity fraud
The latest survey from the DTI into the IT security of UK businesses has revealed that firms could be making themselves more vulnerable by using software-based two-factor authentication rather than hardware tokens. Software tokens, where a small file is placed on a user's computer, have been adopted by many firms as a relatively cheap way of increasing security. Telecoms and technology companies are the highest adopters.
But Chris Potter, the partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers who compiled the survey, told vnunet.com that in some cases such systems led to more identity theft not less.
"Two-factor authentication is the most popular form of control, but there's a little bit of a sting in the tale," he said.
Police Test RFID-enabled Badges
Two U.S. police departments are testing a radio frequency identification system to manage badge inventory and beef up department security.
By Clare Swedberg
March 10, 2006—Police departments in South Carolina and Massachusetts are testing a radio frequency identification system to manage badge inventory and department security better. Both are testing the SmartShield system, which consists of officer badges with embedded RFID chips and a records management software application known as Enforcement Identification (Eid).
RFID Journal
Date: 2006-03-16 |
Finger-scan technology may replace cash in the lunch line
(Chicago Tribune (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) When the resident bully tries to do a lunch-money shake-down, kids at some schools can just tell the tormentor to talk to the hand.
That's because in certain school cafeterias, finger-scan technology is replacing cash in the lunch line. So instead of digging for coins, kids simply place their fingers on a scanner. In seconds, the computer links to a kid's account and pays for lunch. This finger scan isn't the "CSI: Miami" variety. The scan only takes a partial picture of the finger. In order to remember each finger, the scan picks several points to memorize.
Consumers give nod of acceptance to biometrics
Use of biometric technologies such as fingerprint- and iris-recognition has got the thumbs-up from UK consumers in a survey of attitudes towards biometrics as a means of fighting ID fraud and their perceptions about issues such as data privacy and the technology's reliability. The research of 1,000 households has shown that two out of three consumers believe their banks should be using biometric technology to combat identity theft ahead of security tokens or smart cards.
The survey demonstrated a surprisingly high level of support for biometrics, said Ed Schaffner, director at Unisys Corp, the vendor behind the independent survey. "Consumers are only going to use technology they are comfortable with and understand," he said. "People do remain skeptical, in the main because they don't understand the amount of security that is put around these schemes to maintain data privacy."
Third Lords rejection of ID cards
Government plans to force all passport applicants to have an ID card have been defeated in the Lords for a third time.
Peers voted by a majority of 35 to overturn the proposal, which was backed by MPs earlier this week. Opposition peers say the plans break the government's promise that ID cards will initially be voluntary. The Lords insist it should be voluntary for people who apply for new-style biometric passports to have their details entered on a national database. But Home Secretary Charles Clarke told the House of Commons on Tuesday passports were "voluntary documents" that no-one was forced to renew.
No security in security stocks?
scams are on the rise. So why are stocks in security companies struggling?
By Amanda Cantrell, CNNMoney.com
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - The rise in online scams such as identity theft and phishing is bad news for consumers -- but is it good news for investors in companies who make products designed to stop these attacks?
Not necessarily. Some security stocks such as Symantec, Cogent and McAfee have gotten nicked this year, owing to both company-specific issues and to the fact that Microsoft announced it is entering the consumer security space, which spooked some investors.
CNN Money
Date: 2006-03-15 |
Biometric card loopholes
I’ve just finished writing a column inspired by a gentleman I met recently, who has a problem with birthdays. He is a British citizen, but also a Muslim born in Iraq. According to Islamic tradition he is 67 years old. However, because the Islamic year has fewer days than the Gregorian year, he is only just able to claim his pension in the UK. In fact, he is still waiting for his pension. Although he was actually born on 28 February 1941, making him 65, according to the UK authorities he is still 64. As I explain in my article, he was forced to make up a birth date of 10 September 1941 on his arrival in the UK in 1960. This was because he didn’t know how to translate his Islamic birth date – 1 Safar 1360 – into a Gregorian date until he was able to use a computer program to do so, in 1992. So he can’t claim his pension for another six months......
IT Week blog
Date: 2006-03-14 |
Deutsch
Zum ePass kommt der ePass-Leser
Im Rahmen des "Justiz- & Sicherheitstags" der CeBIT gab es eine erste öffentliche Bilanz über die Erfahrungen mit dem neuen ePass. Mit insgesamt 600.000 Passanträgen sei der mit einem RFID-Chip ausgestattete Pass etwas schwach gestartet, so Frank-Rüdiger Srocke vom BMI-Referat 4 für Biometrie, Meldewesen, Pass- und Ausweiswesen. Das sei offenbar darauf zurückzuführen, dass viele Bürger zuvor noch den billigeren Reisepass beantragt hätten. Srocke kündigte an, dass alle Passstellen im April einen ePass-Leser bekommen, mit dem jeder Bürger überprüfen kann, was auf dem Chip gespeichert ist. Außerdem plane das Bundesinnenministerium vom 29. Mai bis 1. Juni in Berlin ein "Test-Event", bei dem alle ePässe der Welt und alle Pass-Lesegeräte in einem großangelegten Crossover-Test die Interoperabilität der Pässe nach den Normen der Flugsicherheitsbehörde ICAO unter Beweis stellen sollen.
Heise Online
Date: 2006-03-15 |
Niedlicher Spitzel
Ultraschallsensoren, Sprach- und Gesichtserkennung - mit der maximal knuffigen Technologiestudie "Papero" zeigt NEC auf der Cebit die Überwachungstechnik für die Haushalte von Morgen. Groß wie ein Plastik-Papierkorb und mit ähnlicher Farbgebung scheinen zwei Papero-Roboter neidisch im Hintergrund zu stehen. Dem dritten tätschelt Herr Ito den Kopf. Das Gerät bewegt sein Köpfchen vor und zurück und gibt Summlaute von sich.
Der Spiegel
Date: 2006-03-16 |
Nederlands
Remkes opent aanval op hooligans
Voetbalhooligans zullen voortaan nauwlettend in de gaten worden gehouden. Die waarschuwing geeft minister Remkes van Binnenlandse Zaken af bij de introductie van een databank waarin de gegevens van de meest gewelddadige relschoppers worden verzameld. De kennisbank vormt een onderdeel van het nieuwe project Hooligans in Beeld (HiB), waar Remkes een half miljoen euro voor uittrok. Uiteindelijk ontstaat een hooligan-top-500 die bij het Centraal Informatiepunt Voetbalvandalisme (CIV) wordt geregistreerd. Alle 22 regiokorpsen met een club in het betaald voetbal werken mee aan het systeem dat, zo schrijft de VVD'er vandaag aan de Kamer, 'eind 2007 moet zijn afgerond'.
Overheidsnieuws
Date: 2006-03-13 |
Europese privacy baas: "Biometrie onbetrouwbaar"
Regeringen die biometrie willen gebruiken om burgers te identificeren houden geen rekening met de privacy gevolgen, zo waarschuwt Peter Hustinx, Europees toezichthouder voor Gegevensbescherming en voormalig voorzitter van het College Bescherming Persoonsgegevens. De kritiek van Hustinx volgt op de wens van de Europese Unie om verschillende databases aan elkaar te koppelen, zoals het Visa Information System en Eurodac.
Volgens de Europese privacy baas is er een diepgaand onderzoek nodig naar de privacy gevolgen van dit soort databases en moeten er ook veiligheidsmaatregelen komen. Die moeten ervoor zorgen dat gegevens eerlijk en rechtsmatig verwerkt worden en voor een legitiem doel. Verder heeft hij ook kritiek op het gebruik van biometrie, omdat vingerafdruk en DNA identificatie onbetrouwbaar zijn.
"Het is spijtig dat de bescherming van persoonsgegevens niet goed onderzocht is als onderdeel om de interopabiliteit van deze systemen te verbeteren" zegt Hustinx.
Security.nl
Date: 2006-03-15 |
Biometrie op de mobile
De biometrische software van het in Californië gevestigde Neven Vision zal door het Japanse NTT DoCoMo worden gebruikt voor mobiele gezichtsherkenning. Transacties van gevoelige data wordt beveiligd door de identiteit van zender en ontvanger eerst via biometrische gezichtherkenning vast te stellen. 3G.co.uk
Emerce Mobile
Date: 2006-03-16 |
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