Biometric products are being taken seriously, especially after they have shown promise in providing security against terrorist attacks. As a result, these products are no more treated as a vendor-specific units and this is the sign of maturation of biometric industry. The standard organizations like ISO, ICAO and ANSI are joining hands to standardize these products, so that the end-user gets most appropriate security components. Biometric standards have further confirmed that the technology holds the talent to become next big thing in the field of high-level security.
Role of Products Manufacturers
The integrators or manufacturers of biometric products play a decent role in setting up the standards for these products. The technical specifications decided by these manufacturers can become the part of biometric standards for these products. For this, the integrator must hold an impressive record of delivering flawless products and those accepted by organizations from different domains.
Responsibility of Standard Organizations
Various formal and informal organizations like ISO and ANSI are assigned the responsibility to decide standards for the biometric products. These organizations evaluate the end-user expectations from products based on this technology. For instance, a fingerprint scanner, which is designed for installation at an airport, can be standardized by these organizations according to the following factors:
* Framework used for developing the product.
* Template protection offered by the product.
* Testing of the product.
* Biometric authentication context and so on.
Similarly, other biometric products like face scanner, handwriting analyzer, iris scanner and others are standardized by following an exclusive process of evaluation.
Examples of Standard Adoption
* E-passports is the product offered by biometric industry to verify the identities of various passengers. The product is standardized by ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization).
* INCITS (International Committee for Information Technology Standards) has set up biometric standards for various biometric products employed by United States Department of Defence.
* BioApi is the official standard belonging to ANSI (American National Standards Institute), which has been used to standardize more than 40 products from biometric industry.
If you are feeling the need of installing a biometric product in your organization, you need to check up the biometric standards before opting for a product. If your vendor still convinces you that there are no standards defined for the biometric products, he is trying to befool you. Every biometric component is designed using standards set-up by trustable organizations and thus, these products are really coming out of the age.
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