The eyes have it: High-tech method could replace PINs

New automated teller machines that feature an identification device once thought of only in science fiction will become available in some parts of the country later this year.

NCR of Dayton, Ohio, and Sensar Inc. of Moorestown, N.J., have announced plans to pilot bank machines that will use iris identification rather than personal identification number (PIN) security to authorize their use. IrisIdent will appear at some of the nation's largest banks within the next 12 months, officials said.

The eye-opening identification procedure will take up only slightly more bandwidth than PINs for initial transactions, but it will require greater bandwidth for transfers between machine networks, according to officials from bank machine supplier NCR.

It takes about 512 bytes to store and transmit a customer's iris. That is several times larger than the PIN system, which typically uses fewer than 50 bytes. The company plans to eventually reduce that amount to less than 100 bytes.

Still, the additional bandwidth requirements will mean little on the latest bank machine models, which transmit data at 9600 b/s or more. More bandwidth could be required when several transactions are switched from one regional bank machine network to another, said NCR's senior consultant Bill Koch.

Iris recognition is also more secure than other forms of identification now in use, NCR officials say. Magnetic stripe cards can be easily copied. Banking industry officials have said for several years that magnetic stripe technology is dead and smart card technology, which uses a chip with stored memory, has been slow to develop.

No two irises are the same--even the irises of each person's right and left eye are unique.

The system can distinguish one iris from another by using 400 discriminators. By comparison, fingerprinting uses 60 discriminators.

IrisIdent could also let banking machines provide more services.

"NCR's personaS range of [bank machines] allow banks to [issue] airline tickets, insurance certificates, stocks and bonds. Until now, concerns over fraud have made banks reluctant to make full use of these capabilities," said Kiki Wallje-Lund, vice president of business development and strategic marketing.

Although NCR officials said the iris is scanned in such a way that it's nearly invisible to the consumer, some say consumers won't be comfortable with it.

"It sounds very high-tech and very neat, but I don't think people are ready for it," said Danny Briere, president of TeleChoice Inc. "People started using ATMs when they became comfortable pulling out their credit cards for other items. They're not going to be comfortable having their eyes scanned."