How Accurate are today’s Fingerprint Scanners? (2024)

Fingerprint biometrics has attained the level at which it can be securely used for personal identification and authentication from low to high security applications. This technology can be tweaked for high security (such as two / multi-finger authentication) as well as convenience-focused use cases (such as authentication with partial fingerprints on mobile phones). It can also be used with other authentication factors (such as passwords, IDs, etc.) for even higher security by setting up two/multi-factor authentication.

However, fingerprint biometrics still has many limitations and challenges to address.

Despite the unprecedented growth and advancements in biometric fingerprint recognition technology, spoofing still remains the biggest challenge for this technology. Biometric spoofing is a circumvention method, in which a fake replica (such as a finger, mask, eye, etc.) is presented to a biometric system in order to circumvent its security. This replica has to have the exact biometric pattern to be able to circumvent the systems.

To address the problem of spoofing attacks, today’s biometric fingerprint recognition systems make use of anti-spoofing technologies and liveness detection mechanisms. It is helpful in ensuring that the fingerprint sample is presented by a person and not by a spoof, however, a highly sophisticated spoof that can imitate liveness features may still be able to fool these systems. Spoofing attacks and anti-spoofing countermeasures are going to be a constant tug of war between security experts and cybercriminals.

Biometric identifiers are unalterable in nature, which means they cannot be changed like your password or PIN or reissued like IDs, if compromised. If a cybercriminal is able to capture your biometric patterns (such as fingerprint pattern, 3D face geometry, etc.), s/he can create spoofs (such as fingerprint replica, 3D face mast, etc.) to circumvent a biometric system you are registered on.

There is also a possibility that an electronic system (such as a sniffer, third party application, etc.) is used in conjunction with the biometric system to capture your digital biometric data when you use the system. Biometric devices encounter this problem by encrypting the biometric data before storing or transmitting it. Anti-spoofing and liveness detection technologies are other approaches to deter the circumvention of biometric systems.

Like all other technologies, biometric systems also suffer from technology-related limitations. Today’s fingerprint recognition systems can work in harsh environmental conditions as well as challenging scenarios, still, they cannot keep up beyond a certain limit. For example, harshest environmental conditions such as excessive humidity, extreme temperature, intense ambient lighting, etc. may cause them to break. Technical failures may be rare, yet they can happen. Fingerprint recognition systems, being electronic devices, depend on electricity to function so episodes of power outage/failure will render them unusable.

Time of response in modern fingerprint biometric systems is faster than ever and in 1:1 matching, most system will take only a fraction of a second to authenticate an identity. However, the biggest problem with these systems is reliability when used in crucial situations, where errors such as false rejection cannot be afforded.

There are scenarios where errors like false rejections or false acceptances can be fatal, even disastrous. For example, a law enforcement officer may not afford a false rejection from a smart gun that uses fingerprints to unlock the gun safety lock. In the scenarios where the officer needs to use his/her weapon quickly, delay caused by false rejection can be fatal.

Superficially, fingerprint biometrics may seem as if it has the ability to provide identity to anyone who has at least one finger; however that is not always the case in real-life circ*mstances. Today’s biometric fingerprint recognition systems are more efficient than ever and would accept most fingerprint patterns. However, they still need fingerprint quality of to be above a certain threshold to be able to accept and process them further.

People with imperfect or worn-off fingerprints automatically get “out of coverage” as the recognition systems cannot read or accept their fingerprints. There can be many reasons causing fingerprint quality to deteriorate. In most cases, age and skin diseases can cause fingerprint quality to deteriorate.

Work conditions that require people to use their hands for manual labor or handle chemicals regularly, can also cause fingerprints to wear off. Population coverage can be a major challenge in large-scale biometric identification campaigns. However, this challenge can be addressed with multi-modal biometrics that leverages more than one biometric modality to establish an individual’s identity, (such as face + fingerprints).