Survey of biometric authentication for e-assessment

Problems of impersonation and other malpractices of various degrees have continued to mar the electronic-assessment (e-assessment) of students at various levels. The use of traditional methods of password and token passing for identity management and control has failed to provide acceptable solution to these problems, due to their susceptibility to theft and various forms of violations. The failure of these and other methods in identity management has propelled the emergence of different biometric-based systems as solutions. The biometric systems use naturally endowed traits which include fingerprint, face, iris, voice, etc. for more reliable human identification and authentication. In this paper, various biometric modes are discussed along with their application within the domain of eassessment. The results in this paper show that the need for multimodal biometrics and transparent authentication in an e-assessment is still an open issue.