What are Biometrics?
Biometrics are physical or behavioral human characteristics that can be used to digitally identify a person to grant access to systems, devices or data. Examples of these biometric identifiers are fingerprints, facial patterns, voice or typing cadence.
How do Biometrics work in a security key?
Biometrics are biological measurements or physical characteristics. Once biometric data is obtained, like in a security key or example, it is then saved so it can be used for the future to authenticate into a device or application. Biometric fingerprint credentials are stored in the secure element that helps protect them against physical attacks.
Why are Biometrics used so widely?
There are two common reasons why biometrics are becoming more popular. First, they’re incredibly hard to steal and impersonate due to the body being part of the authentication process. Secondly, they’re easy and simple to use, biometrics cannot be misplaced or forgotten.
What are some uses of Biometric authentication?
Photo and/or video. If a device has access to a camera it could use retina scans or facial recognition for authentication.
Fingerprint Biometrics might be the most commonly known due to the fingerprint scanners in many of our phones and touchpads.
Voice recognition, some telephone based services use voice recognition to authenticate users.
Learn more about biometrics
- Preview the new YubiKey Bio
- Yubico reveals first biometric key at Microsoft ignite
- Why we designed the YubiKey the way we did
Developer resources for biometrics
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