Inexpensive Biometric Locks

[billdeserthills]

I have had a bit of experience with two types of cheap biometric locks and I'd like to warn folks away from buying these if at all possible. The first was a Securam fingerprint activated safe lock. An old gunsmith hired me to install it upon his Fort Knox gun safe. He had purchased the lock from Northern and I installed it on his safe door. Everything was going as planned until we came to the programming section. The problem was in order to program the lock to accept his fingerprint, the lock needed to "read" his finger twice. No matter how we tried this crummy lock refused to read this guy's finger, not any of them twice. After 10 minutes of trying I finally gave up. He called and sent it back in favor of a digital safe lock, also Securam, which I told him I would not stock, as they just seem too cheap.

Yesterday I had a client bring me a small gunbox which also had a fingerprint reader. This was small enough that it could hold just one medium large sized gun, let's say a 1911. Anyhow the woman who brought it to me wanted a price to open it, it had a tubular (ace type) lock in addition to the non-working fingerprint scanner, so I told her for $35 I would pick open the lock. She wasn't a blonde (didn't check the curtains) but I did hafta do some explaining to convince her that the box, which she had paid over $100 for was indeed worth putting another $35 into, so she could get the keys out of it & return it, to get the $100 back (duh) thereby saving her $65...The fake ace lock picked easily and that was when she told me that after following the instructions for some time was unable to get the fingerprint lock to accept her print, which made her soo mad that she slammed the box shut with the keys inside.

Anyhow, keep on the lookout for these cheaply made fingerprint locks, remember when you are safeguarding a gun that you may need during crunch-time to save your life with, paying a few extra dollars for the next
higher up (better quality) lock on the market could really pay off!

[Hachronn]

Call me a Luddite if you will, but biometric locks have never struck me as a great choice for weapon storage. I've always imagined that if I had to fight my way to the gun safe there's no telling what kind of shape my hands and fingers might be in. I also doubt that most commercial scanners do a great job reading through blood.

[allan501]

Skipping my opinion that most gun "safes" offer the security of a luggage lock on a soft side suitcase.

I have actually worked with biometric readers for many years. They can be quite useful in the right application and completely useless in the wrong application.

The first thing to understand is that fingerprint readers usually work by looking at certain features of a fingerprint and measuring the pattern and relationship of those features. I don't think I know of any that actually scan the actual fingerprint. Once the measurements are made the reader searches its database for a match with a stored pattern and if it finds a "good enough" match it does whatever it is supposed to do.

This leads to the second thing you need to understand. A biometric reader can fail two ways. It can give a false positive, that is it can scan an unauthorized print and match it to an authorized print and unlock or do whatever the reader does. A false negative is when the reader scans an authorized print but rejects its. Trying to balance these two risks is fairly difficult since an adjustment to make a small decrease in false positives can result in a large increase of false negatives and vice versa.

They can be useful where you are doing multifactor authentication, such as an rfid badge and a fingerprint have to be used together.

A gun safe in a secure location can afford a higher rate of false positives since relatively few unauthorized people would have access to the safe but a false negative when an authorized person needs access to the weapon would be a significant problem.

In practice I would recommend enrolling at least one finger from each hand in case of injury or a false negative you have a backup. (Assuming you aren't a shop teacher or a hydraulic press operator.)

I am actually surprised that you would find so many people being unable to enroll. I would expect the cheap readers to be biased towards a very low false negative with a significant false positive rate. Since most people won't have unauthorized people trying the reader they will only notice when it doesn't work for them. So for the manufacturer a high false positive won't generate complaints but false negatives will.

Also I won't discuss bypasses in this forum but you should be aware that a lot of readers, especially the low end ones, are subject some common bypasses.

[lumin]

this is very good post