The password may be on your fingertips

Imagine getting into your car without keys. Or having a computer nearly impossible to break into — because you have no password.

You don’t have to worry about thieves calling everyone in your contact list if you lose your cellular phone. It has a key that can’t be found in a kitchen drawer, under the floor mat or under a fake rock in your garden. The key is your finger.

That is a world that Melbourne, Fla.-based AuthenTec Inc. and others are trying to usher in with a technology that uses computer chips to read a person’s fingerprint before granting them access to cellular phones, computers, personal digital assistants, cars and even buildings.

Experts say the sector AuthenTec is in, called biometrics, is only expected to grow in a security-conscious post-9/11 world. Hastening the technology adoption is that people don’t like remembering passwords; fingerprint-restricted devices could cut down on identity theft; and the chips themselves are getting better, faster, cheaper and more reliable than ever.

From 2002 to 2004, worldwide revenues for biometrics, which also include devices that read your retinas, the shape of your hands or features of your face, doubled, from $600 million to $1.2 billion. Revenues are expected to mushroom to $4.6 billion in 2008, according to New York-based International Biometric Group.

“This is a field that is definitely growing,” said David Fisch, a consultant for International Biometric Group. “Post-9/11, the public sector funded a lot of research and development in biometrics. Now, people are seeing it’s not just a futuristic technology, but a mature technology. It’s ready to go now.”

Like most electronics firms, he said, companies are continually finding ways to make the fingerprint sensors that would be fused to a cellular phone or computer smaller, cheaper and faster, with fewer errors not giving the proper people access. The fingerprint-sensor technology is relatively new, coming into its own in the mid-1990s.

Now, Fisch said it is possible for a consumer to buy a fingerprint-sensor plug-in to restrict access to a computer for around $100, which “was not possible just a few years ago. When you log on, you don’t have to worry about passwords anymore. It saves time and is more secure.”

That would explain why employees of the American Stock Exchange are using fingerprint sensors to get into work and why the Transportation Security Administration is starting a program that registers a person’s iris pattern to speed check-in at plane boarding.

In the next few months, consumers should start seeing announcements from “three of the five top PC makers in the world” that they are offering products with fingerprint chips, AuthenTec president Scott Moody said.