Agency gives biometrics a home

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.fcw.com/geb/articles/2002/1021/web-cha-10-21-02.asp

By Dibya Sarkar 
Oct. 21, 2002

The Chicago Housing Authority has given the thumbs up to a fingerprint
identification technology that it hopes will provide greater security
for its network.

Since its approval last summer, CHA ({http://www.thecha.org}
www.thecha.org) has begun installing the biometric technology in an
effort to reduce the myriad of passwords that the 500 or so employees
use to access various databases and systems, said Bryan Land, the
agency's assistant chief information officer.

The technology would help authenticate a user and possibly reduce the
chances of unauthorized access, he said, adding that employees also
sometimes share passwords with other people. Land also said the
technology reduces the workload of his "fairly small IT shop" of 30
individuals and a help desk that would have to continually deal with
password-related problems among the user base at one of the largest
public housing agencies in the country.

Gene Chayevsky, president and chief executive officer of Miramar,
Fla.-based BioLink Technologies International Inc., which developed
the biometric technology that CHA is usin, said more than 50 percent
of network breaches occur from within an organization. The technology
has an audit trail so the agency knows who's accessing what
information and when.

Land said CHA employees were receptive to the fingerprint technology,
which is less invasive than using retinal technology. BioLink's
U-Match Mouse, embedded with a small digital fingerprint reader, scans
an individual's thumbprint in about a second. Land said each mouse
costs about $85 to $90, and the authentication server costs about
$16,000 to $17,000. By next year, the technology should be fully
implemented.

Chayevsky said the secure database that authenticates the thumbprint
scan doesn't actually contain digital representations of such prints.

"They are, in fact, mathematical models representing the unique points
called minutiae of a fingerprint," Chayevsky said. "Most biometric
companies don't work with fingerprints, most work with mathematical
models."

Although not as accurate as retinal identification technology,
Chayevsky said fingerprint technology is "very, very accurate for most
enterprise applications."

Chayevsky called CHA "visionaries" and "innovators" in deploying the
still-growing technology. "I think this is still fairly early days in
the evolution of biometrics generally," he said, adding he expected a
lot more government agencies to follow CHA's lead soon.

Land said it's true that governments aren't usually on the leading
edge, but added: "This, we felt, was a pretty safe proposition. It was
a win-win. We didn't risk anything and we had a lot to gain by it."



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