biometrics and access control

Software companies are faced with external security threats from hackers and others, along with a variety of even more threatening internal security threats, like corporate spies. This has resulted in companies being more vigilant thus implementing necessary precautions to prevent unauthorized access to the pool of data within the company. These precautions include access management (access control) as well as access technology (biometrics). Industries around the world have agreed that strong access control, biometrics and security practices should be the cornerstone of every security strategy. So I will be going over the basics and each type of access control and biometrics and then I will supplement a recommendation that will provide the best security for the software company.

First I will be going over what is access control and the various models. Access control is the management of admission to resources. It grants authenticated users clearance to specific resources based on the restrictions of the access control model. Access control primarily consist of the authentication of whom ever is trying to gain access to the resources, which confirms the identity of the user trying to log in. There are 4 models of access control: Mandatory Access Control, Role Based Access Control, Discretionary Access Control, and Rule Based Access Control. Let’s look at each of these models and see what they entail.

Mandatory access control creates a classification of resources and allows access only to people of a certain security clearance. The controls are enforced by the operating system. For example, the operating system cannot convert a classified document to a lower classification without a formal, documented process of declassification by ...

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...nt, and remain still for approximately 15 seconds while the scan is completed. A retinal scan uses a unique light source, which is projected onto the retina to highlight the blood vessels which then a image is recorded and then analyzed. One major benefit of a retina scan is that it cannot be faked as it is currently impossible to replicate a human retina.

Hand recognition devices analyzes the structure of the hand which include shape and proportions of the hand, example: thickness, width and length of the hands, fingers and joints; texture of the skin surface such as ridges and creases. When verifying a user they have to place the palm of their hand on the recognition device and align their hand with the guidance pegs which indicates where the hand should be properly placed then it check the database in order to verify the user, it usually just takes a few second.