In the federal government, Common Access Cards and personal identity verification cards for employees and contractors incorporate biometrics and give agencies a better foundation for security and ID management than many private-sector organizations enjoy.
But that wasn’t always the case. A few years ago, Kayvan Alikhani, senior director of technology at RSA Security, would have recommended against using most biometrics as the front line in authentication.
The technology returned too many false positives and false negatives to be reliably used. Yet today, he said, “with iris detection, we’re at one out of 5 million when it comes to false acceptance or rejection rates.”