Biometrics and User Authentication

Biometrics is a field of technology which has been and is being used in the identification of individuals based on some physical attribute. As funding for research has permitted there has been an effort by several tech companies to develop standards for hardware and software that would be used throughout the industry in further development within this area. The purpose of this paper will be to look at the use of biometrics technology to determine how secure it might be in authenticating users, and how the users job function or role would impact the authentication process or protocol. We will also examine personal issues of privacy in the methods used for authentication; the cost of implementing a biometrics authentication system; the efficiency of biometrics authentication; and the potential for false positive or negative recognition of individual users.