Times of Malta reports last month that the Maltese Passports Office has started issuing biometric passports, thus providing holders with a more secure travel document.   “timesofmalta.com” indicates that the launch was made last October by the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Communications, Austin Gatt, who said that the new passports were ...

There are significant privacy and civil liberties concerns regarding the use of such devices that must be addressed before any widespread deployment. Briefly there are six major areas of concern: Storage. How is the data stored, centrally ...

Scientists from the Monell Center present behavioral and chemical findings to reveal that an individual's underlying odor signature remains detectable even in the face of major dietary changes. The findings using this animal model support the proposition that body odors provide a consistent 'odorprint' analogous to a fingerprint or DNA ...

Users may be concerned that the use of biometric authentication will increase the danger that they will find themselves targeted by ruthless criminals who are intent on gaining entry to the assets protected by the biometric. With non-biometric authentication, cards, keys, and passwords could be stolen and used by criminals without the presence of ...

If details of countermeasures employed in biometric systems are publicised, it may help attackers to avoid or defeat them. Similarly, if attackers know what countermeasures are not employed, this will help them identify potential weaknesses in the system, and direct attacks towards those weak areas. The counter-argument is that public exposure of countermeasures and ...

Many encryption algorithms are publicly available to allow cryptographers to analyse and verify the strength of the encryption. Biometric algorithms are not readily available for review and are thus an unknown factor. Biometric algorithms do not generally fulfil the same purpose as cryptographic algorithms. Rather, they represent the encoding rules for the biometric feature ...

This is a sometimes heard expression of concern about the potential misuse of biometric data stored on central databases. It refers to the threat to privacy that such centralised collections of personal data could pose if compromised. Biometric data are regarded as personal data and hence subject to the controls appropriate to personal data. ...

Biometric systems may be initially adequately secure, but become less so with passing time. This could be because critical security parameters such as threshold settings become maladjusted, or sloppy enrolment procedures lead to poor enrolment quality. Some biometric systems are self-adaptive which means that the templates are updated each time a user accesses the ...