What is Biometric Verification? Meet the Next Level of Security

What is Biometric Verification?

Biometric verification is a method by which you can be identified using physical aspects that are specific to you. These aspects include your fingerprint, voice, retinal patterns, hand and face scans, and more. However, the most commonly used biometric features are a person’s fingerprint, voice, and facial scan. 

You have likely already used biometric verification in some capacity. Most personal electronic devices these days come fitted with biometric authentication features like fingerprint readers and facial recognition.

Apple’s Touch ID and Face ID are examples of proprietary biometric verification methods.

How Secure is Biometric Verification?

Due to its increased security, biometric verification has quickly become an industry standard, as well as a preference among consumers. Previous security measures were low-tech, and therefore easy to implement, but they were also vulnerable to breaches.

Brute force attacks were a common way to breach through password-protected systems. These attacks were especially effective against weaker passwords like “1234”, “password”, “password@123”, and more. Users would typically select these weaker passwords so they could easily remember them, but these passwords left their systems exposed to beaches.

Biometric verification is a much more secure way to protect your systems, as it is pretty much impossible to copy a person’s fingerprint, voice or facial features perfectly.

Use Cases/Applications of Biometric Verification 

As we mentioned, most consumer electronics use biometric authentication as a way to unlock devices. This has led to patterns and passwords being replaced by their biometric alternatives. The uses don’t stop here though.

Biometric verification has found use cases in the following ways as well:

• KYC: Banks, lenders, and even government organizations use biometric verification as a way to complete Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures. These entities typically use your fingerprints and facial features as a way to verify your identity.

You might have come across certain platforms that ask you to upload a picture of your identification, along with a selfie. With the help of highly trained AI models, these platforms cross-check your facial features against the proof of identity.

Biometric verification allows you to complete KYC procedures anywhere, without having to visit these entities in person.

• Security: Biometric verification is often used by banking and other financial apps as a measure of security. Many devices that these apps are installed on already have a fingerprint reader, a facial scanner, or both.

These apps use these readers and scanners to act as a last line of defense. You may have often noticed that your phone requires you to scan your fingerprint or face before making any payments using your bank’s app. This protects your finances from unverified use in case your device is lost or stolen.

• Identification: Airports often use biometric verification to cross-check a person’s identity against an existing database. This helps avoid misuse of lost tickets, as well as helps keep track of the passengers moving through international borders.

How Does Biometric Verification Work?

Biometric verification works by storing a person’s physical characteristics to match them against a live sample that it scans.

Screens and touchpads can easily function as fingerprint scanners and are often seen on mobiles, laptops, attendance devices, and more. These scanners record complete prints of your fingers. The prints are then stored on the device’s storage. Now, every time you want to unlock your device or punch in at work, all you need to do is present the recorded finger to the scanner, and voila! You’re in.

Facial recognition uses cameras to take pictures and record videos of your face from various angles. Then, a 3D model of your face is stitched together in the device storage. In case you want to verify your identity, you present your face in front of the camera of the concerned device, it scans your face and compares it with the saved data to ensure that nobody else is trying to impersonate you.

Voice recognition works by recording a clip of your voice and creating a model. With voice recognition, you can train a device to recognize not just your voice, but a specific phrase in your voice. This adds an extra layer of security.

How Signzy Can Help

Signzy has a wide range of APIs that you can use to integrate biometric verification into your platform. With biometric verification, your business can scale beyond traditional geographical boundaries and enforce security, avoid fraud, and verify consumer identity anywhere across the globe.

Signzy’s APIs ensure a fast and seamless verification process so that you don’t lose any customers due to lengthy or complex onboarding processes. We also offer Optical Character Recognition (OCR) API that can extract essential data from images of identification documents.

Conclusion

Biometric verification is a secure and reliable way to achieve security and reduce fraudulent activities. It is also less complicated than previously used security measures as people no longer need to create and remember complex passwords or patterns. Biometric verification has also made identity verification simpler by taking the need for physical presence out of the equation.