MasterCard is rolling out biometric security across its products and will allow customers to access their accounts with a photo of their face when using its mobile app, or using a fingerprint scan.
The system, which will be available in the UK and 14 other countries from the summer, will mean shoppers can complete a purchase online without ever needing to enter confirmation codes, passwords, or PIN numbers.
The news was welcomed by other payment providers, who praised MasterCard for opening up further options and security provisions.
“MasterCard’s announcement is part of a larger movement towards allowing people to prove who they are, simply by taking a selfie,” said Paco Garcia, CTO of identity app Yoti. ”By offering an alternative to the hassle of remembering passwords and usernames, they are making their customers’ lives easier and more secure. The key challenge for any of the selfie authentication solutions we are seeing emerge at the moment is ensuring the right live person is in front of their phone.”
Last week, HSBC became the latest British bank to introduce the system through fingerprint scanning and voice recognition services when accessing accounts through a mobile device.
Barclays already allows some of its corporate clients and Wealth customers (those with a higher income or high valued assets) to log in to their accounts using a biometric reader, and also has voice recognition software, enabled for certain users, with RBS and NatWest also offering finger print technology to some customers.
A recent Visa Europe study found that three-quarters of 16-24 year olds in the UK would feel comfortable using information such as fingerprint scans, facial recognition or retina scanning in place of traditional passcodes.
Overall, three-quarters (76 percent) of this age group said that they would feel comfortable making a payment using biometric security, with over two thirds (69 percent) believe this will make their lives faster and easier.
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Why do they want to sacrifice security?
Whether face, iris, fingerprint, typing, gesture, heartbeat or brainwave, biometric authentication could be a candidate for displacing the password if/when (only if/when) it has stopped depending on a password to be registered in case of false rejection while keeping the near-zero false acceptance.
Threats that can be thwarted by biometric products operated together with fallback/backup passwords can be thwarted more securely by password-only authentication We could be certain that biometrics would help for better security only when it is operated together with another factor by AND/Conjunction (we need to go through both of the two), not when operated with another factor by OR/Disjunction (we need only to go through either one of the two) as in the cases of Touch ID and many other biometric products on the market that require a backup/fallback password, which only increase the convenience by bringing down the security.
In short, biometric solutions could be recommended to the people who want convenience but should not be recommended to those who need security. It may be interesting to have a quick look at a slide titled “Blind Spot in Our Mind & Eye-opening Experience” shown at
http://www.slideshare.net/HitoshiKokumai/blind-spot-in-our-mind-eyecatching-experience