Identity in Cyberspace: The Advent of Biometrics Authentication

Cyberspace has grown into a vital domain of everyday life—we work, socialize, play, and conduct financial transactions online. Our lives now have a digital touch, and much like in the physical world, our identities are at the core of our virtual experience.

We rely on passwords to verify that we are who we say we are and to regulate who has access to an email or Facebook account, a computer or a phone, or even a classified database. But passwords have long been the bane of cybersecurity—people resort to weak default passwords easily discovered with automated guesses, they write them down so as to not forget them, replicate them across many platforms, or give them up to socially engineered cons. Many high-profile breaches have been enabled by the weak link of password-protected identity authentication systems.