The Relevance of Untraceable Biometrics and Biometric Encryption: A Discussion of Biometrics for Authentication Purposes

The initial usage of biometrics dates from a time in which the storage medium of any record was ink and paper. Under this system, samples taken from a person - so-called 'Live' data - were compared, by hand, to a reference sample in order to determine a match. The manual nature of this system largely precluded 'one-to-many' matching, in which a sample was compared against many or all stored records; instead, biometrics were generally used in a 'one-to-one' matching, to confirm that the sample came from a known individual. Additionally, as the biometric data were all stored in a physical means, the records (and the privacy thereof) could be protected by relatively simple physical access controls.