Digital Identification

There are many ways to identify yourself to another person. They can range from just showing your face to perhaps showing a pass to someone. When we show our face to a friend, they know many things about us and they will let us do a variety of things, according to our status with them. We might be able to borrow their lawnmower, but not their fancy car. When we show a pass to someone that we don't even know, they don't recognize us, but they recognize the pass. Because of that, they will let us do whatever specific things that holders of that pass are permitted to do.

That pattern carries through to many facets of our lives. We use our voice to identify ourselves to others over the phone, we use account numbers or signatures to identify ourselves to companies, we use our driver's license or our social security number to identify ourselves to government agencies, and so on. All of these forms of identification have been established to ensure that the people who should be permitted access to various services are able to do so - and that those who shouldn't be permitted to access them to be prevented from doing so.

When we work with computers, we frequently supply a user name combined with a Personal Identification Number (PIN) or a password as a means of identifying ourselves to the software that runs on the computers. As many people have learned, it is entirely possible for someone else to learn that information and then to masquerade as them, accessing services that are supposed to be reserved to them. Services such as withdrawing money from an ATM.

Just about everything that we use to identify ourselves has been stolen at one time or another. Our signatures are stolen by forgers. Our voices are stolen by impersonators. Our usernames and passwors are stolen by phishers. Our passes are stolen by yet more forgers.

Whenever someone steals identifying information, it constitutes a form of identify theft. By obtaining the information that identifies you to a computer, a thief has effectively stolen your identity as far as that computer is concerned. If that thief obtains enough information about you, they can do everything that you can do with computers.

These days, that a lot of stuff. Customer service employees don't know you at all, so if that thief has your username, password, date of birth, mother's maiden name, etc, they can answer all those security questions over the phone and the company employees won't hesitate to help the thief to all the services that you normally use. Computers are even less personal, and if the thief has your identifying information, they get to use the electronic services that you normally use. The computer believes that the thief is you.

Many companies and researchers are working on this problem. The solution has been to take a page from the olden days, when we identified ourselves by the way we look. Computers can be programmed to remember lots of things about our appearance and other things about our bodies. If we then approach a computer that has ever seen us before, it will recognize us in much the same way that our friends recognize us. The solution to the problem has been to recognize something about our bodies instead of recognizing something that we know, such as a password. This is the field of biometrics.

Biometrics is the study of measuring our bodies in a variety of ways. A promising biometric is the appearance of the eye. A computer uses a camera to look at your eye, and it remembers a variety of information about it. When the computer sees the same eye, it assumes that it is you. Because eyes are as individual as fingerprints, it's a good way to recognize people.

For a thief to steal your identity, they'd either have to steal your eye or figure out a way to show the computer a fake eye that matches your own. Neither is particularly practical for the typical thief. Combine the eye scan with other types of biometrics, such as fingerprint scanning or voice recognition, and you've made it even harder for someone to steal the information that identifies you. Someday we may include DNA scanning, requiring even more exotic techniques for thieves to steal your identity.

Now that you've got a way to reliably identify people to computers (and that means identification to strangers as well), what does Fort Data permit us to do? If Fort Data is really locked up tight and it can trust us to be us when we claim we're us, then Fort Data can be relied upon to provide all those delicate services that we were talking about. Services like tracking our health care information. Or our financial information. If you know that nobody is going to be able to get into your financial data unless you say so, you're going to be pretty happy to have that data stored in Fort Data. Without effective identification schemes, you're just assembling all your precious personal information in one place. That provides a greater incentive for thieves to be as sneaky as possible to steal your identifying information. If that identifying information is biometric data, they're going to have a very hard time indeed.