Valuable assets are traditionally protected by secrecy

Valuable assets are traditionally protected by secrecy, typically secret passwords.
Biometric features are often readily observed and do not possess equivalent secrecy.
They may also be captured with varying degrees of difficulty.
This is a variation on the spoofing concern. It is certainly true that the source biometric
features are not secret, but the argument as expressed is based on an incorrect
premise. In fact, biometric security does not depend on the secrecy of the basic
biometric features (people readily rely on biometric identification in its human form in
day-to-day use). Rather, it depends on the integrity of the authentication mechanism
which, in the context of issue raised here, translates into the difficulty of capturing the
biometric features of a target and then constructing an artefact that will spoof the
system. This can be contrasted with a password which, once disclosed, is trivial to
exploit.

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