Cancelable biometrics

Good biometric practice must ensure that:

1.- The sample can be captured only once; this is called cancelable biometrics. An advance in this area was developed by the people at IBM.

2.- The database must store the biometric features securely. This is achieved with cryptography and many well-known techniques for preventing tampering (unauthorized alteration).

3.- A live biometric sample is being captured. Today we have sensors that can sense live fingerprints, read the pulse, temperature, and so on.

Remember that biometrics is one part of the security equation; it must be combined with passwords, tokens and other security elements.
Or better still, have multimodal biometrics…