The use of biomettic authentication covers a lot of territory, but we saw a lot less breadth this year than last. For example, last year we had a facial recognition product. Lack of such a product this year should not be construed as counting it out of the biometrics landscape. Rather, it has been sufficiently successful that this group review came as the new product was upgrading and was not available for review. There is an interesting trend toward lower cost. In fact, some biometric PC access control systems are at or below the price of tokens. This has interesting implications for user-level access control. Last year when we looked at these products, fingerprint scanners were criticized by their competition for false positives and negatives and higher cost given what they are intended to do. This year I can't agree. Most of our products this year are fingerprint scanners, and they show specifications that are quite acceptable for false positives and negatives. As to using these products as endpoint authentication, they have - in part, thanks to Windows - excellent authentication characteristics overall.
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