Aug. 4, 2009 A system that allows biometric data to be used to
create a secret key for data encryption has been developed by
researchers in South Africa. They describe details of the new
technology in the International Journal of Electronic Security
and Digital Forensics this month. If a user, a web customer say,
wishes to send a message or other data to another user, an
online shop, over an unsecured network, the message must be
encrypted to avoid interception of sensitive information such as
passwords and credit card information. Encryption relies on
authentication being symmetric to work. In other words, the
user's password or PIN must match the password or PIN stored by
the online shop to lock and unlock the data. This is because
encryption systems use the password or PIN to produce, or seed,
a random number that is used as the cipher for encrypting the
data. If the passwords do not match exactly then the seed will
be incorrect, the random number different and the decryption
will fail. One way to avoid us