5:11 AM | Labels: System Tips

Biometrics Security

We have seen in James Bond movies that doors can be opened by giving voice copmmands. In some hollywood movies, you would have seen thumb impressions are used to open doors. All these are nothing but Biometrics.

Think of these scenarios.

You go to a bank to withdraw money. You fill up the withdrawal form, sign it and give it to the bank clerk. Your signature is used to verify your identity

You are shopping using your credit cards. While paying the photograph on the credit cards and the signature on the credit cards are used to verify your identity.

In big companies, all employees are issued an ‘employee pass’ with their photograph. People with these ‘employee pass’es are allowed access to the company premises.

In all these above scenarios, signature and photographs are used to verify a person’s identity. In reality any person can learn to use another person’s signature. Worse still is they can replace your photograph with their own photograph on these cards. Therefore, these existing authentication methods are not secure enough.

Biometrics solves these above issues. Every person’s face is unique. Each person’s thumb impression is also unique. Everyone’s voice is different from others. The eyes are also unique for every person. Therefore it makes sense to use these unique features of each person as a means of authentication.

Therefore for using computers, passwords are no longer required. To enter one’s company , employee passes are no longer required. Your body is sufficient. Using any parts of your body the biometrics system can identify you. America, Canada and some european nations already use these security systems.

What is a Biometrics system?

There are two main modules in a biometrics system. “storing” and “comparing”. The sytems must first store your information before it can use this stored information to compare and verify. The storing process however differs between different systems.

For instance, if the biometrics system uses thumb impression as the mode of verification, then your thumb impression will be first captured in film and stored in the biometrics database system. Instead of storing as it is, the system will compress and store it.

If for instance your face is used as the mode of verification, then your face will be photographed in different angles and stored in the biometrics database systems. The same goes for voice recording and eyes mode of verification.

Once this storing process is done, the ‘comparing’ process is done daily or as and when required. For example let us assume that your company uses finger print biometrics systems. When you come to office daily, there will be a finger print reader at the entrace. You will have to put your finger on this finger print reader which will capture your finger print and send to the biometrics system. The biometrics system will then ‘compare’ this finger print to the finger print that was previously stored in the database. If both of them match then you are authenticated.

Advantages of a biometrics system

The fact that you will have to personally be present in order to authenticate yourself is the advantage of this system. Finger print or retina of the eyes of one person do not match with anyone else’s data in the database. Therefore there is abosolutely no chance of other people using your identity.

Disadvantages of a biometric system.

The finger print of those people working in Chemical industries are often affected. Therefore these companies should not use the finger print mode of authentication.

It is found that with age, the voice of a person differs. Also when the person has flu or throat infection the voice changes or if there there are too much noise in the environment this method maynot authenticate correctly. Therefore this method of verification is not workable all the time

For people affected with diabetes, the eyes get affected resulting in differences.

Biometrics is an expensive security solution.

Free Password Management software


To keep computer files, internet connections and other resources just to ourselves, we use passwords. Some people use the same password for everything. This is a very bad practice. Because if someone comes to know about this password then they will get access to all your resources. There fore it is essential to have different passwords for different purposes. But this poses another problem. It becomes very difficult to remember all these passwords. Some write these passwords in their diary or write on a small paper and keep it on their table. This too is a bad practice. Because it is easy for other people to get hold of this information when you are not around.

If you could keep all your password in a database and then encrypt this database and protect it with a password then all your passwords will be safe. Then you just need to remember this one password, so even if you forget other passwords you can still use this password to open the database and check the password.

You can use a free password management software such as ‘Password Safe‘. You can download password safe from http://sourceforge.net and install it in your computer. Then you will never have to remember many passwords.

To create a master password

When you open Password safe for the first time it will ask you for the ‘Safe combination’ which is nothing but the master password for your password database. The safe combination password should be long and contain both numbers and alphabets so that it is difficult to guess. If you give a simple and easy to guess password then password safe will warn you. Now key in the same password again in the ‘Verify’ box and click on ‘OK’.

To add passwords to Password Safe

Click on the ‘Add Entry’ button in Password Safe. In the new dialog box give ‘group name’ (optional) and the title name and then key in your username and password. In the ‘Notes’ section write anything you want to write about the account. Now click on ‘OK’ to add this information to password safe.

As mentioned in the above paragraph add all your passwords one by one. When you close password safe program it will ask you where you want to save this password database in your hard disk. This is only for the first time.

To retrieve the password

If you forgot the password for any file or program and you want to retrive the password from password safe then password safe will first ask you for the ‘master password’. After you give the master password the database will open.

Then click on the ‘title’ for which you want to know the password. Now click on the ‘Copy password to clipboard’ button. Now the password will be copied to the clip board. You can use Ctrl + V to paste it anywhere you want.

When you exit the password safe program, it will automatically clear the password from the clipboard for security reasons.

You can also edit the password if you want.

passwords

What is ‘Safe Mode’ booting?

While your computing is booting, you can instruct the computer to boot in ’safe mode’. Safe mode refers to secure mode. You may then ask, is our computer not secure when we boot normally. Let us see how is safe mode more secure than the normal booting.

When your computer gives problems and you want to identify where is the problem, then you can use the safe mode for this. In safe mode, only limited number of driver programs are enabled. Therefore you cannot use CD drive. You cannot use the printer. And many other unnecessary drivers are not enabled.

While in Safe Mode, you can use the ScanDisk, defrag and other utility programs to repair your computer. You may wonder how to bring the computer to safe mode. When Windows boots up, you have to press the F8 key. You should press the F8 key before the windows screen appears. Then you can choose the safe mode option to boot.

Some Anti virus software will tell you that some viruses can only beremoved in safe mode, therefore the antivirus software will automatically start in safe mode or you may have to goto safe mode and then run the virus removal utility to remove the virus