On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 12:07:38PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > > http://www.nature.com/nsu/020916/020916-15.html > > An idea from some folks at MIT apparently where a physical token > consisting of a bunch of spheres embedded in epoxy is used as an > access device by shining a laser through it. > > On the surface, this seems as silly as biometric authentication -- you > can simply forge what the sensor is expecting even if you can't forge > the token.
Mmmh, assuming that this is really difficult to forge, it's not silly and doesn't compare to biometric authentication. Biometric authentication is a different matter, always bound to a person and usually tried to be used for authentication of persons. I see several applications where these tokens could be really useful where biometric methods are completely useless. Main advantage seems to be that these tokens are extremely cheap. There are heaps of applications where these tokens seem to be just perfect. Strangely, the application mentioned on the website, i. e. credit cards, is not an application the tokens are suitable for, because having an unforgeable token simply isn't the solution to the credit card problem (or at least not all credit card problems). Nevertheless, seems to be an interesting concept. Hadmut --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
