Biometric Authentication
Biometric Authentication is a type of User Authentication with factors in the Inherence category: “Something the user is”. Out of the three authentication factor categories, it is considered to be the most difficult to forge. It is also a major area of current research.
High-security environments have been using biometric authentication for many years. Apple brought biometrics mainstream with Touch ID fingerprint recognition on the iPhone 5s in 2013, extending it to the iPad Air 2 in 2014 and the MacBook Pro in 2016. In 2017, Face ID shipped with the iPhone X as the successor to Touch ID on most iPhones. Apple discontinued the last Touch ID iPhone (the third-generation iPhone SE) in February 2025, so every shipping iPhone now uses Face ID, while Touch ID remains on entry-level iPads and current MacBooks. Today billions of users have a biometric authentication device in their pocket, and third-party applications can use these capabilities for authentication — for example, banking and shopping apps commonly use them to authorize sign-in or payments.
The most commonly used and researched biometric factors used for authentication are:
- Fingerprints
- Retina/Iris scan
- Facial recognition
- Voice matching
- DNA
- Body geometry
- Gait analysis
- Vein matching
- Cranial resonance