ARTICLES
Are Smart Cards safe?
A smart card is a plastic card that contains a microprocessor which is capable of accumulating and processing information. Smart cards are considered to be more invulnerable and adaptable than credit cards that use magnetic stripes for encoding information.
Smart cards are considered to be very secure. Most of the government organizations use smart cards for giving access to the high security areas for the purpose of logging in and out of the networks. The use of the smart cards is considered to be very secure as only a specially conceived reader is required for accessing the data contained in the microprocessor of the card. To top it, only authorized users are allowed to access this information thus making it completely safe.
The popularity of the smart cards is increasing in the present scenario. People increasingly are involved in making purchases by the medium of the internet. Smart cards enhance the process of online purchase by making them more secure. The customers use the smart card readers that are attached to the computers and thus make secure purchases without having to put any data into the online forms of the websites. The information thus given is not accessible without a password and hence is totally secure.
To conclude, the smart cards provide the required security to the valuable information of the customers and make them a prized entity to hold.
Are Biometric Systems Useful for Authentication?
Elevating automation and maturation of modern technological systems, such as cellular phones and internet, have led users to prevailing use of technical ways instead of human beings for acquiring authentication. Personal identity has evolved to the ability of private PIN’s and passwords. Passwords are regularly used in things such as cellular phones, ATM’s, personal computers or access to the internet.
For making the password non-accessible to other individuals, it has to be unique, not present in the dictionary and has to include symbols like %, #, or @. Furthermore, for security resolves, a password has to be not written, never given access to other people, and has to be altered at least after every three months. People nowadays, use as enormous amounts of passwords and it becomes troublesome for remembering these. While the passwords are considered machine friendly, they are for from being user friendly.
There is an answer that brings back the ways of nature. For identifying an individual, human beings contradistinguish amongst physical features such as facial composition or voice. Biometrics, which is the science concerned with the compiling and measuring of contrasting physical aspects, now discerns many characteristics as perfect for the distinct recognition of an identical twin too. Examples comprise the iris, the fingerprint, and also the structure of the veins. For performing the task of recognition at the human brain level (presuming the brain only uses an individualistic biometric feature), 100 million calculations per second will be necessitated. Recently, standard PCs have attained this acceleration, and it is also seen that the sensors needed to evaluate characteristics are getting more affordable. Therefore, the moment has arrived for complementing the password with more consumer friendly solutions - Biometric authentications.