Biometric authentication verifies a person’s identity by measuring a unique physical or behavioral trait, such as a fingerprint, iris pattern, face geometry, or typing rhythm, and comparing it against a stored template. It represents the something you are factor in multifactor authentication.
Two error rates define how well a biometric system performs. The false acceptance rate measures how often it admits the wrong person, the false rejection rate measures how often it turns away the right one, and the crossover error rate, where the two meet, is the standard way to compare systems, where lower is better. A fingerprint reader on a laptop is the everyday example. What candidates should remember is that biometrics are not secrets: you cannot reissue a face the way you reset a password, so a stolen template is a permanent problem, which makes protecting the template store and adding liveness detection critical.
How is biometric authentication tested on the CISSP?
It belongs to Domain 5, Identity and Access Management. Know the three authentication factors, be able to interpret FAR, FRR, and the crossover error rate, and understand why biometrics work best combined with another factor.