Biometry authenticated ATM and Banking

Ameya was on the way to his college. He had to reach in time because he had his exams. But on his way, he had to withdraw cash from an ATM. He got the money but forgot the ATM card inside the machine and went off to write his exam. He was in the middle of his exam when he realized had missed the card in the machine. He came out of the exam to waste his valuable time calling up the Bank to block the ATM card. However, he had lost Rs.15,000 as someone else had withdrawn it already.

With Credit Cards, the situation is much worse. Information about Credit Cards is on sale on various unauthorised websites and we keep hearing the news of credit card rackets quite frequently.

Why not use biometric authentication instead of physical cards? This will eliminate the need for physical card and any passwords. The fingureprint will serve as a complete authentication.

One would have to develop a mathematical function to convert the image of fingureprint into a unique number. The mathematical function should be such that it should generate the same unique number corresponding to a fingureprint of a person. Also, the same number should not be generated for any other person, making it unique. The unique number can be 100 or 200 or even 1000 digits long, or even more. Parts of this number may represent various characterics of the fingureprint, like first 20 digits for the size, next 20 for the central curved lines, next 20 for periferal lines etc.

Once this unique number is generated, it can be encrypted and sent to the database for comparison to retrieve the corresponding bank account. This would save the bandwidth required to send the image of fingureprint and also save the processing time to compare the images.

Such fingureprint readers can be attached to laptops and mobile phones as well to make the access feasible.