Biometrics: succeeding or falling short?

For years biometrics were touted as the solution to the challenge of user authentication – but until relatively recently, they were something that more people had heard about than actually used. Affordable commercial biometric devices have been around in some form since the 1990s, but it is only in the last 10 years that they have really become commonplace, thanks to their widespread adoption in mobile devices like smartphones and tablets 1 , and to a lesser extent laptop and desktop PCs.