With our face masks and gloves, biometric authentication has become increasingly impractical. Let’s see what we can do.
Do you use Face ID to unlock your phone? If yes, then you definitely know what a pain it has been using it when you wear a face mask everywhere you go.
Although Apple, most widely known for Face ID, has released a patch that triggers the fallback pin code much quicker, it doesn’t really address this issue.
In addition, the other mainstream biometric authentication solution, fingerprint ID doesn’t fare very well against the pandemic either. Why?
Well, in the era of the contactless, the fingerprint ID sensor is just another surface you want to avoid touching if we’re talking authentication in public spaces. If you’re, on the other hand, wearing plastic gloves, fingerprint ID authentication on your phone is simply impossible.
With that, it’s clear that the biometric market is now expected to take some hits, although until recently predicted to grow exponentially.
COVID-19 Has Significantly Impacted the Biometric Authentication Market
Let me put a number in front of you – just a couple of months ago, the overall biometric device market was expected to reach US$28.2 billion in 2020 according to ABI Research.
However, due to the pandemic and a major drop in the shipments of biometric devices, the market will experience a revenue drop of $2 billion this year.
It’s important to note that this drop in shipments of biometric devices was mirrored in the smartphone market. In China, for example, we’ve seen the biggest decline ever in the first quarter of 2020 where shipments have surged 20.3% YoY. The same trend, although to a lesser extent of 11.7% can be seen on a global level.
The results of these drops are yet to be seen, although it’s expected that companies who produce these sensors for the consumer smartphone market will have to be very lean in their further tech development while they try to address the issues brought on by the pandemic, and the usage of face masks and gloves.
Current Biometric Authentication Solutions Increasingly Impractical in the Contactless Landscape
When the pandemic first started, it seemed as if the world was turned upside down, resulting in all of us re-thinking our habits, moving most of our everyday business online, and minimizing contact as much as possible.
In March, the NYPD ceased using fingerprint authentication due to Coronavirus concerns. Previously, officers would scan their ID badge and their fingerprint to gain access to the building, so it’s clear how that was seen as a health risk. After the cease, the NYPD stationed officers at all points of entry to carry out manual checks of people’s photo ID’s.
Similarly, the usage of mWallets and other contactless payment methods have skyrocketed.
Then, when we started wearing gloves, fingerprint ID on our phones suddenly became impractical.
If you wore surgical gloves outside, there was no way for you to authenticate yourself but to type in your PIN code, therefore prolonging the time needed for the process, and hindering user experience.
Moreover, as far as Face ID goes, face masks have seriously impacted the user experience and reliability that Face ID is known for.
With your face mask on, your phone can’t authenticate you, once again having to revert to using the slower and less secure PIN code or password authentication.
However, the user experience isn’t all that has suffered. There is now a much higher rate of authentication failure and errors than before.
In fact, so much so that the best of the 89 commercial facial recognition algorithms that were tested had error rates between 5% and 50% in authenticating faces with masks on.
UX aside, we’re now also talking about severe security risks.
Since the masks and gloves will unfortunately not be going away anytime soon, we have to ask ourselves about the future of biometric and mobile authentication.
Where Does Mobile Authentication Go from Here?
Let me start by saying that this doesn’t mean that biometric authentication is going away. If anything, contact-based biometric authentication just might be on the bench for a little while.
In the meantime, the developers will be hard at work devising new algorithms for solutions like Face ID that will make them usable with face masks on, and at the same time secure enough. As mobile sensor technology progresses, this shouldn’t be too hard.
On a similar note, there is still room for mainstream development of the more complex biometric solutions such as iris recognition, that would have no issue with face masks at all.
However, one thing you’ll notice is that most of those are yet to be developed. So, let’s see what type of mobile authentication solutions are already here, ready to be integrated and capable of combatting the potential issues caused by the pandemic?
The best two currently available solutions would be the third-party authenticator app-based 2FA and mobile network-based authentication solutions such as IPification.
While the authenticator app 2FA is much safer than its counterpart, the SMS-OTP 2FA, it significantly lacks from the perspective of user experience.
Imagine standing in line at the store, taking out your phone to pay with your mWallet app, then having to authenticate using the authenticator app 2FA. At that point, it would just be quicker to pay using your contactless card.
On the other hand, IPification is a passwordless authentication solution that authenticates users within milliseconds of sending an authentication request using one tap. It was built to simultaneously support the best user experience and highest-grade security.
A user’s mobile ID is compared against their SIM card, device, and other mobile network data to seamlessly confirm their identity. Best of all, IPification is able to be implemented as part of MFA, able to be used as a standalone authentication solution, able to prevent SIM swapping, and even able to be used as a continuous authentication solution.
It’s ready to be implemented within days. Want to know more? Let’s talk.
