Elsewhere other enterprise vendors are climbing aboard the biometrics train, most notably in the case of Airwatch, an enterprise mobility management provider taken over by VMware in 2014. It supports fingerprint verification using Apple’s Touch ID along with eye-vein based authentication that reads the pattern of blood vessels in the white of the user’s eye. The goal is a consumer-grade log in experience backed by enterprise class security.
App wrapping
“These measures are supported but only from the basis of controlling access to the hardware on the device. They have an app wrapping engine that allows developers to incorporate the fingerprint scanner into their applications,” said Glenn Staunton, director with mobile specialist BConnected.
You still really need the PIN code behind the fingerprint in order to be secure and that’s something that even Apple recognises. There’s a reluctance to truly rely on the Touch ID sensor and we can see that in the fact that every time you switch on an i-device you’re asked to put in a PIN code before the fingerprint scanner becomes active, Glenn Staunton, B-Connected
“While it’s still early days for this kind of functionality, the main concern for people is can they turn it on and can they enforce it? The first port of call is still to deploy a password policy to all a company’s smart phones and it’s important to be able to build that the way you want, whether it be just four simple digits or whether you want it to be more complex, right up to measures that cause the device to be wiped if someone tries a passcode, say, 10 times but gets it wrong.”
Fingerprint scanners and biometrics figure into this policy design, but according to Staunton there are limitations that make the technology still slightly awkward to use. While developers can access the fingerprint scanners, they can only really choose to use it or not for app access – they can’t develop specialist fingerprint apps or use biometrics easily within apps.
“You still really need the PIN code behind the fingerprint in order to be secure and that’s something that even Apple recognises. There’s a reluctance to truly rely on the Touch ID sensor and we can see that in the fact that every time you switch on an i-device you’re asked to put in a PIN code before the fingerprint scanner becomes active,” he said.
“It’s also true that when you go to access credit card information in the iTunes store, you’re asked for your PIN code again. Thereafter you can use the scanner, but it says something I think that this is necessary.”
Earliest days
In general, Staunton said that biometrics is still in its earliest days for Irish enterprise customers but he anticipates a change as the security measures become more mainstream and more trust is created between large corporates and the technology manufacturers.
“There are a lot of corporates looking to deploy single-sign on to various applications but we’re not quite there yet,” he said.
Overall, there is a strong argument that with something like biometrics, it needs a major hardware manufacturer such as Apple or Microsoft to take the leap of rolling it out in order to have the technology accepted.
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