Once confined to James Bond movies, "biometric" security devices that rely on personal characteristics - fingerprints, voices or faces - may become the keys and magnetic cards of tomorrow.
"The biometrics field as a whole is past the embryonic stage," said Mr Christopher Tomes, chief of Veritel, one of scores of companies at the Comdex show in Las Vegas last week. "It's a real technology and it works."
Intelligence services and companies that require high security have relied on biometrics for some 20 years. But this futuristic technology familiar to fans of Agent 007 is just now entering the mainstream.
Biometric security companies say that the devices offer reliability without requiring users to wear badges or memorise cumbersome passwords, numbers or codes.
"It dramatically improves security while being transparent to the user," Mr Tomes said.
Veritel has just announced the launch of voicecrypt, a new access control and file encryption product for personal computers and laptops that relies on voice verification, or "voiceprint" technology.
Users can get access to their applications and encrypted information with their voices instead of passwords.
"The biometric security market is a rapidly growing, $250 millionplus marketplace, and voicecrypt provides the security and ease of use that government, corporations and individual users all demand," said Mr Mark Homuth, Veritel's general manager and vice-president.
As with any technology, voicecrypt is not fool-proof. It has a margin of error of between 1 per cent and 2 per cent.
Voice recognition devices are expected to lead the field because they require only a microphone or a telephone, unlike fingerprint identification devices that must come with a print-reading scanner.
Banks developing automatic telephone customer services favour voice recognition, as do companies seeking to protect employee voice-mail systems now accessed by a simple code.
The biometrics industry has an eye on a larger market encompassing personal computers, cellular telephones and other portable equipment.
CyberSign, which checks the authenticity of signatures, already is appearing in some computer equipment. The device scans onscreen signatures to determine whether the equipment should be turned on.
For its part, Visionics is offering authentication, surveillance and identification technology based on face recognition. Authorities are counting on that technology to help them crack down on phony drivers' licenses.
At Comdex, Visionics introduced FaceIT DB, face-recognition software it says can dramatically improve security. "In a boarding area of an airport, for example, a system linking FaceIt DB to a surveillance camera can match one of the passengers' faces to that of a known terrorist," the company said. "At a major department store, a similar setup can alert security personnel to the presence of a convicted shoplifter within minutes of his arrival."
