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The average home user really isn’t too concerned with security, which is why a regular computer running a Windows9X install is pretty much a meat market for anyone who wants to snoop around your system. Microsoft never really did tighten up the security in Windows, and even if you set a password, it is oh-so easy to hit the ESC key at the logon screen and voila, in you go.

But the problem of securing a computer goes beyond even the poor protection offered by Windows9X. The problem lies in the fact that the identification scheme is based on something anyone can provide: a password. Even if you had secured the password screen (some freeware programs exist to do this) on Win9X, or even if you run Win2K, people are going to be hacking into your system through your password. I’ve had my email account password on Hotmail hacked once – it’s not funny. Well that’s why biometrics is becoming such a hot item for security. Sure, anyone who knows your password can get right into your system (provided he has access to the system in the first place), but it’s a lot harder to fake a retina or fingerprint scan.

Vertical views of the ID Mouse

Fingerprint scan devices and retina scan devices introduce a protection scheme based on keys that, in theory, only you can possess. Barring some pretty extreme measures, nobody should be able to fake your identity if your system is protected by a biometric system.

General Information

The Siemens ID Mouse is one of the first devices to integrate the FingerTIP sensor technology to provide biometric security for any Windows based system (drivers and extensive PDF documentation are included for Win98, Win NT, and Win2K). Identification is based on the biometric characteristics of your fingerprint, called minutiae, which acts as a unique identifier for each person. The sensor actually uses 65000 sensor electrodes to measure the distance between your skin and the surface of the reader. In less than 100ms the 224x288pixel scanner can generate a digitized image of your print, and then software will analyze and compare the minutiae of the scan versus the minutiae of the original authenticating print. Sounds pretty James Bond-ish doesn’t it?

For those who are extremely paranoid, your fingerprint data is NOT stored in its entirety. Instead, only characteristic features are stored for referential data, and the original fingerprint can not be reconstructed based on this data. The FingerTIP sensor is compact, fast, and low on power consumption, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see it integrated in other products like laptops and even PDAs.

Using the ID mouse in general

Once the mouse is installed, the standard logon screen is replaced with the ID Mouse identification screen, which means that the installation is tightly integrated with the system (no more hitting ESC to bypass the login in Win98).

A fairly robust application is included which let’s you manage users… basically, through this software, you can set any and all of a user’s 10 fingers as the identifying prints. You can also set the security level of the scans to either high, medium, or low. This security setting affects how much detail is analyzed in order to determine a proper fingerprint match. Think of it as a specificity threshold – at high security, the software looks for more matching characteristics, so you can be more certain that the user is who he or she claims to be. But at this level, there is also a higher chance of rejections of legitimate users due to variances like placement of the finger, angle of the scan and other factors. On the flipside, the lower security setting reduces false rejections, but it also means that someone who has similar biometric characteristics to yours can actually spoof the software.

The user manager also allows you to set timeouts for scans and allow passwords to override the fingerprints. Personally the latter option is sort of foolish – if you are planning on securing your system against password intrusion, why even allow any password override at all?

When we tested the mouse, it worked pretty much as advertised. We set up several users and scanned in their fingerprints for identification, and proceeded to test the whole setup. Identification, including the scan and the actual authentication takes around 2 seconds on a Celeron 566 system, which is a lot slower than we liked.