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Personally, I wouldn’t be advocating for biometric security as I see two major issues with it…
1) It’s nowhere near as secure as people think
2) You can’t change a compromised “key” (eg, if someone has a record of your finger prints, you can’t just go and change your ifngers!)
See the article at https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/16/gummi_bears_defeat_fingerprint_sensors/
@Article said:
he took latent fingerprints from a glass, which he enhanced with a cyanoacrylate adhesive (super-glue fumes) and photographed with a digital camera. Using PhotoShop, he improved the contrast of the image and printed the fingerprint onto a transparency sheet.
Matsumoto took a photo-sensitive printed-circuit board (which can be found in many electronic hobby shops) and used the fingerprint transparency to etch the fingerprint into the copper.
From this he made a gelatine finger using the print on the PCB
Matsumoto tried these attacks against eleven commercially available fingerprint biometric systems, and was able to reliably fool all of them.
Although elsewhere in the article it only gives an 80% success rate.
So, as long as you make sure that you don’t leave your fingerprints anywhere, and you don’t use any other system which records a fingerprint scan, then you should be OK using them for security.
However, if there are RFID tags that can have their codes changed (which is what these cloned tags would be) then there shouldn’t be any reason why you can’t just write your own unique codes onto RFID tags and get people to change them periodically. (eg, when a unit changes owners or tenants you delete the old tags from the system, put new unique ID numbers into the tags, and then re-add them to the building’s system. This would stop any previous clones from working).
Other options would be some of the more obscure key shapes (preferably ones that are under patent protection) or, depending on how far you want to go, multiple security devices (such as a tag and a fingerprint).
You will never find a perfect solution, you’ll have to strike a balance between cost, security and convenience.