Identity Primer: Biometrics 101 Video

Mar 29

NOTE: This is a reprint of an article originally published by Alex Kilpatrick in September 2013 on a different blog. We are reposting them on the Blink Identity blog because these issues are important and we want to keep our writing on these issues in one place.

Our co-founder Dr. Alex Kilpatrick has a lot of experience working with biometrics. Over the past decade, Dr. Kilpatrick has developed a variety of biometric systems for foreign governments in the Middle East. He was the sole developer of biometric/security systems for the Jordan International Police Training Center, the Iraq Ministries of the Interior, Petroleum, and Water, the Iraqi High Tribunal, and several fingerprint scanning efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other confidential programs. He also served as the technical lead of the Iraqi Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), the Iraqi National ID Card proof of concept, and the Iraqi permanent resident ID card. Dr. Kilpatrick has deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Jordan twenty-five times in support of system development and research.

In this video, he presents an overview of the various modalities of biometrics (face, iris and fingerprint are the most common) and their different applications to electronic ID verification. This presentation is a broad overview of the three most popular biometric modalities and common misconceptions about them.

It's important to understand the technologies used today and what they can and can't do. Technology isn't good or evil, but technology that is poorly understood can more easily be abused and misused.