Securing the elderly in cyberspace with fingerprints

There is an urgent need to protect the elderly population from malicious adversaries in this era of Internet of Things and hyperconnectivity. However, conventional security solutions require users to remember long random and complex keys (e.g., passwords), which may prove to be challenging for the elderly, especially for those patients who suffer from serious memory loss. In this chapter, we propose to use fingerprint information to secure data on devices used by the elderly so that they are not required to remember or update complex keys and passwords for their devices and systems. Different fingerprint-authentication algorithms are analyzed and compared on the basis of their matching performance and computation complexity.