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You're So Veined

Will a new biometric at the Port of Halifax overcome hurdles that other biometrics haven't?

By the end of November, the Port of Halifax will be using biometrics as a second factor of authentication to access its port facilities, as mandated by new regulations. But Halifax won’t be using fingerprints, retinal scans or voice prints. Instead, port security officer Gordon Helm chose vascular scanning. The relatively new technique uses a passive infrared scan of the back of your hand to take a picture of the vein pattern and match it to a stored image of the same.

After some trials, Helm believes vascular scanning could become the biometric that gains widespread acceptance and, finally, overcomes the main hurdle to widespread adoption of biometrics: perceived invasiveness. “It’s five seconds holding your hand out and done,” he says of the device, which looks like a small ATM and includes a keypad for an optional third authentication method. “It’s very quick, very efficient and very accurate.”

Transport Canada recently mandated that ports have a way to prove a person holding an issued access card is the person it was issued to—a concept known in security as nonrepudiation. Helm said few options besides biometrics were feasible as a nonreputable second factor. But biometrics are a challenge because they make many people uncomfortable and there is an accuracy concern on both ends. Too many false positives mean responding to meaningless alarms. Too many false negatives mean the security is easy to bypass. So in cooperation with the heads of various labor forces working at the port, from the cruise industry to the trucking and container industries, Helm set out to find the least invasive form of biometrics that was still accurate and efficient.

“We really challenged the industry and vascular scanning came up the best,” says Helm. “It was quick—labor liked that. And it didn’t have as high a false-positive rate as some other techniques.”

The biggest challenge for the access project turned out to be Nova Scotia itself. None of the devices Helm tested could stand up to Halifax’s weather conditions. Snow, freezing rain, wind and salt wreaked havoc with some of the sensitive biometric readers. Helm’s vendors were forced to put in extra research and development so that their devices would continue to operate in poor weather conditions.

–Scott Berinato