Reading Your Palm for Security’s Sake

They aren’t taking any chances at Barclays Bank in Britain. Stating an account number and other bona fides isn’t enough to get to your money at the bank’s wealth and investment management service. As an additional safeguard, a program analyzes customers’ voices when they call in, to make sure they match a voice print on file.

At some A.T.M.’s in Japan, getting cash isn’t simply a matter of entering a bank card and a password. The machine scans the vein pattern in a person’s palm before issuing money.

And, since September, people have been using fingerprint sensors on their iPhone 5s to unlock their devices, or to shop at the iTunes store.

These are three examples of biometrics systems, which have long been the province of border control, military surveillance and national intelligence. Now they are rapidly moving into the consumer mainstream to unlock laptops and smartphones, or as a supplement to passwords at banks, hospitals and libraries.

But the technology also comes with a host of troublesome issues about its vulnerability to hacking and misuse.

The stakes can be high when inherently personal biometric data is hijacked, said Bruce Schneier, a security expert and author of “Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive.” “If someone steals your password, you can change it,” he said. “But if someone steals your thumbprint, you can’t get a new thumb. The failure modes are very different.”

Despite these concerns, the technology is making its way onto the office desktop — and the laptop, too. A newFujitsu laptop, the Celsius H730, released recently in Japan, can be ordered  with a choice of biometrics: a fingerprint sensor or, for an additional $116, a palm scanner instead. To unlock the computer, you hold your palm over the sensor and the software checks your vein pattern to make sure you’re the authorized user, said Joseph Dean, a Fujitsu spokesman.  TrueNews