The Use of Biometrics to Prevent Identity Theft

Abstract

This paper investigates the identity theft and how to effectively use the biometric technology in order to prevent it from happening. Over the past few years, identity theft has become one of the most serious financial threats to corporations in the United States. Identity theft is when a thief steals sensitive information in order to engage in large financial transactions. When a thief successfully steals an identity, he or she may take out large amounts of loans and make purchases in the victim’s name. Identity theft allows thieves to pose as the victim so that all of the thief’s actions will be projected as actions from the victims. Thieves can damage corporations by compromising corporate credit cards as well as file documents to change the legal address of the victim’s company. Throughout the past decade, corporations have been using variations of biometric technology to prevent identity theft. This paper presents a new scheme for corporate identity theft prevention using biometric technology. Specifically, we develop a biometric based authentication system consisting of encryption and decryption processes. To show the practicality of our proposed scheme, an attacker-centric threat mode is created.