Biometrics Is A Better Security Solution

Digital security is becoming a growing concern, not just for businesses that want to protect sensitive corporate data but for private individuals that rely more on online interactions for major activities, such as financial and personal banking transactions. Integrating online transactions into everyday life has created more convenience for enterprises and people. Accessing data—whether corporate or personal finances—from any online device at any time or location makes everything much easier.

However, this comes at the cost of traditional legacy security measures failing to provide adequate protection. Traditional security measures like a single password are too vulnerable in the modern online age. Before, knowing a password was just one more requirement, besides accessing the right device in the right location, so the password itself was part of an analog multifactor authentication process with other requirements.

Today, however, a single password can grant someone on the other side of the world access to confidential data or personal funds using their own phone, laptop, or computer as long as they have correctly guessed or stolen a password from someone using social engineering techniques. The convenience of a password is now also its greatest security weakness.

Biometric Authentication Bring Better Security

Biometric authentication is something many people are already familiar with. Rather than requiring people to remember passwords or numeric codes, biometric authentication uses the unique identifiers of each person to grant access. The most common examples today are facial recognition, voice recognition, and fingerprint recognition, with many of these methods already used on phones and laptops.

Using biometric authentication or combining it with other multifactor authentication systems such as passkeys achieves two objectives simultaneously. Biometric authentication adds an extra layer of security that can’t be casually guessed at or counterfeited since it requires a considerable budget, time, and effort to mimic a person’s voice, face or fingerprint, thus providing too high a barrier of entry for the majority of criminals to make it worth it. The second objective is that this eliminates the need to use passwords at all, which can make for a faster, more convenient form of security access, in addition to being more secure.

All of this is now being optimized and standardized by the Fast Identity Online Alliance, or FIDO, which aims to make it easier to implement FIDO-based systems into any business setting to protect both enterprises and their client or customer data. If you’re ready to improve your digital security and want more details about FIDO-based passwordless authentication systems, read here to learn more.