Forwarded From: Nicholas Charles Brawn <ncb05at_private> 04Aug98 AUSTRALIA: COMPUTERS - WHEN IT COMES TO SECURITY, THE EYES HAVE IT. By John Davidson. The world's largest maker of automatic teller machines, NCR, yesterday took the wraps off an ATM capable of scanning a customer's eyeballs, which could lead to a new generation of self-service financial products. The ATMs, already deployed in a trial in the United Kingdom, were showcased at a conference in Sydney yesterday. They read the iris of anyone standing at the machine and match it with a database of customers to identify the user. Like fingerprints, the human iris is highly individual - even varying between left and right eye - and does not change over a lifetime. This makes iris-recognition technology ideal for security systems. Mr Dan Milton-Hine, the general manager of Self Service for NCR's Financial Solutions Group, said the additional level of security afforded by iris recognition, as opposed to PINs, enabled banks to offer high-value transactions such as stocks and bonds, and even airline tickets, through ATMs. The technology comes at a time when other advances in ATM technology are opening the way for further diversification of banking products. High-quality colour printers, capable of printing such things as postage stamps, could see ATMs become the self-service focus of a number of previously unrelated goods and services. Even ordinary banking would be simplified, because the iris scanner, sitting just above the ordinary ATM screen, took only two seconds to identify someone and was quicker than a PIN-based system, Mr Milton-Hine said. Iris recognition is expected to make big inroads into internet commerce, too, as a means of securing the weakest link in existing security systems - the user's PC. Although the digital signatures used in internet security systems such as SET are considered secure for the internet leg of the transaction, experts have questioned just how secure the overall system can be if the bank does not know for sure who is sitting at the PC and invoking the signature. -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: New Dimensions International [www.newdimensions.net]
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