Fingerprint Biometrics at International Borders - Research Paper Example

? Fingerprint Biometrics at International Borders Border security has been a major concern to most countries globally since the terrorist attacks in the United States of America. Countries have been more vigilant to ensure that only authenticated persons cross into their territories. Traditionally, identifiers such as visas, passports and identification cards have been used to identify and verify persons in organizations and by government agencies. However, with advancement in technology, more effective techniques that hinder fraud have been applied. The use of biometrics which identifies one based on physiological or behavioral traits have found mass application. There are various traits that could be used for identification but this paper focuses on fingerprint biometrics as a widely used technology to ensure border security. The aim would be to determine from secondary sources whether the system could be considered effective in attaining its intended purpose. The paper will also seek to analyze the costs involved in acquisition and operation of such systems and whether the current economy would sustain such technologies. Despite the cost involved, the benefits of acquiring and implementing such technology should guide on whether to employ such technology or not. Introduction Since September 9 bombing of the US, countries have been increasingly adopting effective mechanisms to ensure that only verified and authenticated individuals cross their borders, access computer services and other service areas such as banking and commerce. Border crossing presents a myriad of challenges because it involves physical introduction of persons capable of causing harm into a country. As such, transportation, particularly the aviation industry, becomes a paramount target for effective installation of security since it supports emergency response, commerce, law enforcement, economic development, leisure and personal travel. According to Federal Aviation Administration, FAA (2002), aviation opens up investment to the local communities and presents new domestic and even international supply chains and markets. With all these movements that a country would be exposed to realize development, the need for a reliable user authentication mechanism arises. Bragdon (2008) while considering transportation across borders in general observed that security involved in transportation could cost as much as 6% of the annual GDP globally, hence, an integral aspect of the economy. Therefore, this calls for building capacity and increase in cooperation both domestically and internationally. According to Ratha, Connel and Bolle, “the consequences of an insecure authentication system in a corporate or enterprise environment can be catastrophic” (2001, p. 614). Among these consequences could include wrongful denial of service, loss of confidential data and information and compromising the integrity of data. Literature Review Various methods have been traditionally used to identify individuals in various countries and organizations. Passwords, PINs (personal identification numbers) and IDs (identifiers) have proved to be inefficient. Passwords and PINs could be illegally acquired by an intruder, hence, allowing unauthorized access to one’s resources. Protection of repudiation also becomes difficult as linking usage to a user becomes almost impossible when users share passwords or when a credit card number is used online. In modern world, a combination of user ID and corresponding password would still be considered inadequate. Ashbourn (2000) points out at biometric identity verification as a radical alternative to these traditional forms of identification and verification. Biometrics technology employs behavioral or physiological traits to identify the identity of individuals including fingerprints, retinas, typing styles, teeth, speech recognition and hand geometry. Since the biometrics would be an individual’s intrinsic property, duplication and sharing of user identity becomes difficult. Furthermore, it would only take serious accidents and happenings for these traits to be lost. But Rhodes (2003) points out at the variability in performance, capabilities and complexity of each of the available biometric technologies. Hence, well informed decisions should be made on the type of biometrics appropriate for any given circumstance. In most cases, a combination of several of these physiological and behavioral traits would ensure reliability of the obtained information. Fingerprint biometrics Fingerprint biometric technology has been widely used since its discovery in the late 19th century and first made commercially available in the 1970s, as noted by Rhodes (2003). The distinctiveness and long term invariance of fingerprints, except in cases of bruises and cuts, makes this technology reliable. With the advent of computers, the development of automated fingerprint technology took effect. The first step of fingerprint authentication process involves acquisition of fingerprint impression by use of an inkless scanner. There are various types of scanners including capacitative, optical, thermal and ultrasound sensors used to collect digital image of the surface of a fingerprint. Today, optical sensors are the most common according to the National Science and Technology Council, NSTC (2006). The collected image would be digitized at typically 500 dots per inch and with 256 gray levels per pixel (Ratha, Connell, & Bolle, 2001). The digital image captures unique features of minutiae comprising of ridge endings and bifurcations. An automated feature extraction algorithm then locates these features from the fingerprint image with each feature represented by its respective location and direction. The ridges would normally be further enhanced to nullify the effect of noise. Finally, the matcher subsystem would attempt to match these sets of features and would be expressed as a score from where a decision of matching would be made. A decision threshold would normally be selected prior to this and scores below the threshold would be a mismatch while those above the threshold lead to declaration of correct match. Fingerprint biometrics presents two kinds of recognition errors: false accept rate, FAR, and false reject rate, FRR. While false accept occurs when a non-matching fingerprint is accepted as a match, false reject occurs when the system rejects matching fingerprint. FAA (2002) refers to these errors as false match rate, FMR and false non-match rate, FNMR respectively while Cole (2005) defines these using false positive and false negative respectively. These two errors are complementary such that with the lowering of one of them, the other increases automatically. Operating at null error rates for both would not be possible. Ratha, Connel and Bolle (2001) recommend operation at equal error rate, ERR, where both error rates are equal citing possibility of achieving error rates of 10-4 false reject and 10-6 false accept for high performance systems. Lerner (2000) notes that fingerprint biometrics technology experiences lower accuracy than iris scans because of its fewer degrees of freedom at 40 against that of irises at 200. Those with faint fingerprints and without fingers do not qualify to use the automated fingerprint identification system. Poor quality of input image would not be accepted by the system during enrollment and also during authentication. These two deficiencies cause failure to enroll, FTE, error. According to Liu, a failure in biometric test could be an indication of “an impostor or an honest person falsely rejected” (2011, p. 42). Either way, the consequences remain undesirable and action should be taken to limit such eventualities. Consequently, fingerprint biometrics faces user acceptance challenges with the public further raising concerns on privacy which involves protection of their personal data against any form of misuse including identity theft, loss of anonymity and the possibility of obtained data revealing medical information. Lerner argues that with mass biometric identification, “the big brother” would always be watching and would use such opportunities to track dissidents and make resistance more difficult as it happened in the 1960s and 1970s with the COINTELPRO program by the FBI (2000, p. 23). The researcher cites the US as an example of a government that has access to the universal biometric identifier, also used for commercial transactions like banking. Similarly, fingerprints could be lifted off surfaces of glass, even from fingerprint scanners by use of a cube of gelatin and graphite powder and used to fool scanners elsewhere. But Rhodes (2003) argues that the Privacy Act 1974 prohibits federal agencies from collecting, using or disclosing personal information including fingerprints. Accordingly, this act protects personal biometric information from being used by federal agencies. Hygiene issues have also been cited with fingerprint biometric technology as those whose identities are being identified have to place their fingers on scanners shared by all such persons. Diseases could be transmitted through contact in such cases. But opponents of this argument claim the risk in this case to be insignificantly minimal (Cole, 2005). Otherwise, humans would fall sick by everyday use of door knobs at homes, workplaces and vehicles since the risk involved is similar. Cost issues Just like in all other information technology investments, there has to be a cost-benefit analysis and assessment (Morgan & Krouse, 2005). As such, there would be need for development of a business case that would identify organizational needs. This should aid in formulation of system goals that should address the expected outcomes of the system including binding biometric features to an appropriate identity or identifying undesirable individuals in the watch list. Performance parameters should also be specified. This process enables the estimation of the expected cost, both the initial and recurring. Initial costs include designing, developing and testing, implementing the system; personnel training; cost of hardware and software; improvement of network infrastructure; and enrollment cost. On the other hand, recurring costs include software and hardware maintenance, program management costs, token cards issuance and personnel training. Against these costs, the benefits that accrue would be weighed (Rhodes, 2003). Research Problem With the existence of some degree of mismatch, the probability of making errors arises. Therefore, there is need for more research to determine the accuracy of information obtained from fingerprint biometric technologies. With minimal research comparing the cost of acquiring and maintaining fingerprint biometric systems with the ability of the current economic state, the need for more research studies arises. Research Questions As such, questions arise on whether fingerprint biometrics technology could be considered to be effective. Similarly, there are concerns on whether the current economic state would sustain use of fingerprint biometric technology. These are the questions that this paper seeks to address. Objectives i. To determine whether fingerprint biometrics is an effective method in border security ii. To determine whether the cost of fingerprint biometrics technology could be sustained by the current state of economy Research Methodology In this research, the researcher conducted a survey on effectiveness and cost of fingerprint biometrics using data collected from credible secondary sources to ensure validity and reliability. These include sources published by government agencies, educational institutions and research organizations. The use of secondary data was informed by its cost effectiveness and time saving in addition to giving high quality data. Longitudinal analysis would also be possible through this method. Nonetheless, the researcher loses control over the quality of data to be collected. Data collection and analysis Data giving an indication between fingerprint biometrics and its accuracy was collected using random convenience sampling from secondary sources using Google search engine with the following key words: fingerprint, biometrics, accuracy, cost, border and security. Qualitative analysis was done by extracting relevant information from various sources and documenting. The grounded theory principles were observed where there was no pre-conceived hypothesis on the research. The results were analyzed and conclusions on findings made. Finding and Conclusion Studies by various researchers have discredited fingerprint biometrics as wholly reliable form of identification and verification. Sten, Kaseva and Virtanen (2003) used molds with fingerprints to test precision of 100 SC Scanner. Their findings indicate that fingerprint scanners do not provide ultimate protection and should therefore not be trusted to solely guard a system. Further, Brumnik, Podbregar and Ivanusa (2011) used Weibull approach to determine the reliability of these systems and found out that these systems begin to age relatively fast with 88.8 days being their reliability days. People have fallen victim of such inaccuracies with the source either being human or mechanical. Cole (2005) gives an example of Brandon Mayfield, a victim of inaccuracy in fingerprint biometric recognition in the US. Mayfield was implicated in the Madrid bombing of March 2004 after the latent fingerprint extracted from the bag that was used to carry the explosives matched his. The suspect had his fingerprints in the database because of the samples he gave on arrest in 1984 and following his service as a military officer. The suspect claimed not to have been out of the US for the past 10 years and he did not have a passport. However, despite these claims, a match of his fingerprints had been documented by FBI’s Senior Fingerprint Examiner with Latent Print Unit, Supervisory Fingerprint Specialist, retired fingerprint examiner and Unit Chief verifying the findings. A few weeks later, the FBI retracted the findings as erroneous. Such incidences make the public skeptical about the accuracy of fingerprint biometrics technology. Despite significant recordings of such inaccuracies, latent print examiners still defend fingerprint biometric systems as infallible. A research study by Cappelli et al. (2006) evaluating the performance of fingerprint biometric technology recommends use of computational efficiency and also template size to make an appropriate algorithm. As such, a research on accuracy of fingerprint biometrics technology conducted by National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, mandated by the Enhanced Border Security Act and the USA PATRIOT ACT recommended increasing the number of fingerprints scanned from 2 to 10 (NSTC, 2006). It was found that accuracy directly relates to the number of fingers. More so, Brumnik, Podbregar and Ivanusa (2011) recommend use of more than just fingerprint biometrics for identification and verification. To further support this argument, Sten, Kaseva and Virtanen (2003) propose use of smart cards in addition to fingerprint biometric technology to increase accuracy and choose to view fingerprint scanners as replacements to passwords which operate alongside other security measures. Despite allegations of computer power dropping the cost of acquiring fingerprint biometric devices by Lerner (2000), Morgan and Krouse (2005) note the persistent substantial cost of acquiring biometric systems and its recurring costs. The authors of the 9/11 Commission recommendations give an example of the budget for US-VISIT during the 2004 financial year that cost $328 million. Incorporating biometric technology into visas cost between $700 million and $ 1.5 billion annually as at 2002 depending on the type of technology and number of applicants. The same would cost between $ 1.6 and 2.4 billion annually if implemented on US passports. These costs are less fielding and planning costs. A research by Brumnik, Podbregar and Ivanusa (2011) also indicates the unavailability of fingerprint biometrics systems with the cost of maintenance being too high. The hardware costs in the technology used in fingerprint biometric technology could be several US dollars per match per second according to Lerner (2000). There also arises the practical challenge of record keeping. More so, operational costs for not only fingerprint biometrics systems, but all the other biometric systems, have proved to be high. Errors made during latent fingerprint identification have also seen governments incur not only monetary cost but also a cost on image and inability to identify respective criminals. Still, so much of the budget goes into research and development, not only to acquire more effective biometric technologies but to also significantly reduce the associated costs. Researchers in information technology and criminology have devised different technologies that would be important in reducing the cost of fingerprint biometric technologies. Rhodes (2003) proposed the replacement of the fingerprint biometrics dedicated sensors with general purpose cameras found in cellular phones and laptops among other devices. Unfortunately, images generated by such devices do not meet the quality of the dedicated fingerprint sensors. As such, there would be need to process the images obtained from these devices to make them as much as possible similar to those obtained from fingerprint dedicated sensors. Even with this innovation still under test, fingerprint biometric remains the least costly method of biometrics identity and verification as compared to more sophisticated technologies such as iris biometrics systems. Conclusion Despite the drawbacks in using fingerprint biometrics for identification and verification, including its high cost of acquisition and maintenance, its use keeps rising because of innovative applications in place that seek to maintain high degrees of accuracy. In spite of some few cases of inaccurate information, today, fingerprint biometric technology has become a critical solution in tackling security challenges in government agencies and private corporations. But even before implementation, well informed decisions should be made on the technology to use and a detailed cost-benefit analysis and assessment conducted so as to ensure that the gains from such systems outweigh the incurred costs. Those who remain skeptical about fingerprint biometrics technology for reasons like performance, accuracy and reliability should combine these security systems with other available security measures such as smart cards. Fingerprint biometric technology would not solely provide accurate information needed. Otherwise innovation in this field is expected to continue and humans would always seek to come up with better fool proof techniques and tools in fingerprint biometrics. References Ashbourn, J. (2000). Biometrics: Advanced Identity Verification: The Complete Guide. London: Springer. Bragdon, C. R. (2008). Transportation security. Burlington: Butterworth-Heinemann. Brumnik, R., Podbregar, I., & Ivanusa, T. (2011). Reliability of Fingerprint Biometry (Weibull Approach). Retrieved 10 April 2012 from http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/21760/InTech -Reliability_of_fingerprint_biometry_weibull_approach_.pdf Cappelli, R., Maio, D., Maltoni, D., Wayman, J. L., & Jain, A. K. (2008). Performance Evaluation of Fingerprint Verification Systems. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 28(1), 3-18. Cole, S. A. (2005). More Than Zero: Accounting for Error in Latent Fingerprint Identification. The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 95 (3), 985-1078. Federal Aviation Administration. (2002). Federal Aviation Administration Research and Development Review. Washington D.C.: Office of Aviation Research. Lerner, E. J. (2000). Biometric Identification. American Institute of Physics, pp. 20-23. Retrieved 10 April 2012 from www.aip.org Liu, Y. (2011). Scenario Study of Biometric Systems at Borders. Computer Law and Security Review. The International Journal of Technology and Practice, 27, 36-44. doi:10.1016/j.clsr.2010.11.006 Morgan, D., & Krouse, W. (2005). Biometric Identifiers and Border Security: 9/11 Commission Recommendations and Related Issues. CRS Report for Congress. Congressional Research Service. National Science and Technology Council (2006). Fingerprint Recognition. Retrieved 10 April, 2012 from www.biometrics.gov Ratha, N. K., Cornell, J. H., & Bolle, R. M. (2001). Enhancing Security and Privacy in Biometrics-Based Authentication Systems. IBM Systems Journal, 40(3), 614-634. Rhodes, K. A. (2003). Information Security Challenges in Using Biometrics. United States General Accounting Office. Retrieved 10 April 2012 from http://www.gao.gov/assets/120/110297.pdf Sten, A., Kaseva, A., & Virtanen, T. (2003). Fooling Fingerprint Scanners – Biometric Vulnerabilities of the Precise Biometrics 100 SC Scanner. 4th Australian Information Warfare and IT Security Conference. Helsinki University of Technology. Read More