as an electronic purse at our cafeteria and store," he says. The employee cards will be smart cards with fingerprint minutiae stored on them. "We're looking at this in lieu of personal identification numbers, which are readily compromised," Lisker says. Freeing up the help desk The city of Oceanside, Calif., is well beyond the initial testing phase when it comes to using fingerprinting to authenticate users. With 90% deployment, Michael Sherwood, director of the city's IT department, says the city is already saving $30,000 to $40,000 per year, and the IT department has been unshackled from password torments. "Password-related calls made up about 25% of the calls coming into our help desk," says Sherwood, who started using fingerprinting technologies from Identix about a year and a half ago. "And we figure each one of those calls cost us $20 to $50, factoring in that a field technician has to be dispatched to make sure the password is delivered to the right person, not someone posing as that person." Then there's the call to check back with the user to make sure everything is OK, plus the user's downtime while he is waiting for help. "We have so many different systems, and each system has its own security," Sherwood says. "You need a password to log on in the morning and another password to get to certain files and then another password for financial applications, for example. And then you figure that people have to remember their ATM PIN number, their home security PIN, the security code for their cars and their cell phones. It's just all too much. We had to simplify that." And looking at Oceanside's help desk statistics, it seems they've succeeded. Sherwood says the IS department has only received 10 calls for assistance with the fingerprint scanners since Oceanside started using them in 1998, and most of the problems can be traced to dry skin or small abrasions that inhibit the scanner's reading. "Our security administrator isn't spen...
