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Pentagon interest may give boimetrics needed boost

BRIDGEPORT, W.VA. - In this rural outpost about a four-hour drive from the nation's capital, the Defense Department has set up its first biometrics testing laboratory to scientifically scrutinize hundreds of commercial products that scan unique physical traits - such as eye, finger or voice - to prove a person's identity.

The goal at the Biometrics Fusion Center, as the Defense Department calls it, is to determine if any of the nearly 600 products on the market are good enough for widespread - and possibly mandatory - use by Defense Department personnel to gain access to computer networks in the future. If the department puts its weight behind biometrics, it could push body-based authentication technology from the exotic to the mainstream.

But analysts following biometrics say that while products are improving, shortcomings remain. In general, the products are expensive and raise privacy fears. Biometrics offerings, particularly those for fingerprint scans, can also have high error rates, mistakenly rejecting someone based on his fingerprint. Despite such worries, the U.S. military is taking a hard look at biometrics to determine if body-based authentication can replace passwords, says Phil Loranger, the U.S. Army's director of the Defense Department biometrics program.

Passwords can be stolen or sometimes cracked, but someone's fingerprint, voice-print and iris scan are unique, he notes. "What attracted the Defense Department to this technology is that it can make our systems much more secure than passwords," Loranger says. Biometrics authentication also can work with public-key technology, even in place of the password typically needed to gain access to the keys, he adds.

During the next few months, the Biometrics Fusion Center will run tests on numerous biometrics products, with some preference for ones supporting the BioAPI standard developed by the Biometrics Consortium. That standard allows an application to support multiple types of biometrics authentication across vendor boundaries without having to write to separate APIs. While there aren't plans to release the test findings, the Biometrics Fusion Center hopes to make recommendations to the Pentagon's upper echelons on the use of biometrics that could lead to large-scale purchases.Currently, biometrics finds limited use in the military, mainly in pilot programs at the U.S. Army Reserve centers and the Army Major Command for Emergency Operations Center.

According to research firm IDC, the biometrics market stands at about $300 million, with the government and private sector purchasing the technology about eq-ually for use in building and computer access. IDC predicts biometrics will be a $1.8 billion market four years from now. Finger scan, voice authentication and signature verification are the three fastest-growing segments by sales.