A year ago I announced I took a new job back in Windows Security, I have not had much chance to blog since I took the new job but even if I did have the time I could not talk about the stuff I had been working on.
But times are a bit different now, a week ago was the Professional Developers Conference and this week was WinHEC; these were really the 1st events where Windows 7 became a public thing so now its safe for me to talk about what I have been up to.
As I said in a previous post my groups mission is to build platform technologies and solutions that enable secure password-less authentication into Windows, networks and the applications built on our platform.
To that end over the last year we have defined and delivered a platform for Biometric Devices in Windows, the "Windows Biometric Framework", this has been one of the best projects I have worked on at Microsoft.
Its just amazing that a year ago we had a whiteboard drawing and now we have a full platform and solutions built on that platform with support from great partners like Upek and Authentec (there are others too but I can't name them yet).
The cool bits of this project are in the platform, not in the user interface but the part people get to see is always a good place to start, in the "Hardware and Sound" control panel you now see a Biometric Devices control panel applet:
It exposes a set of common tasks related to Biometric devices, these of course include "Use your fingerprint to log on to Windows".
The control panel applet itself includes a list of Biometric Units that are registered on the machine, this machine (my Lenovo X61) has a Upek based Biometric Unit, you can see it bellow:
From this location you can "Remove your fingerprint data" if you do not feel comfortable with this data being persisted on the machine, or you can manage/enroll fingers.
Currently the platform only supports fingerprint readers, but its designed to support other concepts like facial recognition, vein recognition, geometry, iris and more.
In future versions of Windows, as these technologies become more common I hope to see it expanded to include native support for them as well.
So far the feedback has been great, the solution is the fastest we have tested and it allows for these solutions to co-exist, so you can buy a laptop with a built in fingerprint sensor from one manufacturer and a mouse with a sensor from another and they can both work on the same machine, unfortunately today that's not normally the the case.
There is lots more in store for Strong Authentication in Windows 7 also, I will try to write more about this and other features in this area in the future.