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Biometrics to have key role in e-commmerce

Public key infrastructure encryption and smart card defenses on their own will be breached, but combined with biometrics they can offer very high security.

Systems integrator Unisys predicts that biometric technology will have a key role in authenticating users for e-commerce and e-government. But biometric technologies, which identify users from their unique physical characteristics, need to be integrated with digital certificate and smart card technologies to fully secure transactions, said John Souder, head of personal identification technologies at Unisys. Public key infrastructure encryption and smart card defenses on their own will be breached, but combined with biometrics they can offer very high security, he said. The major barrier to biometric take-up remains that people associate it with an Orwell Ian state, said Unisys.

Souder said that public-private partnerships would be key to the future of personal authorization technologies. He added that systems such as Microsoft's Passport online authentication service and that of the Liberty Group were complementary, not competing technologies.