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A key to unlock mobile devices - finger-licking good?

Huge, clumsy and complex fingerprint readers are available to ensure that nobody but you can use your portable PC. Rainbow and G&D may have found an answer for users of very small pocket devices, too.

The new product looks like a perfectly ordinary token which plugs into the USB socket. But most such devices can be stolen, and so they need to be protected by a PIN to be remembered by the user.

So security experts love the idea of fingerprint readers. You press your finger onto a sensitive pad, and it says yes; it's you, and you can use the machine.

But users don't like them, because they tend to be clumsy to carry around. A typical "biometric" reader as sold by IBM plugs into a ThinkPad and needs powering up, and is bigger than most pocket PCs. They aren't at all discreet, either.

The "concept" device shown at CeBIT this week is small, discreet, and - best of all - uses almost no extra power. It is a Universal Serial Bus dongle called a SuperToken, and it includes, inside its tiny body, enough processing power to read your fingerprint, look at the image, and match that image to the fingerprint that you recorded when you set it up - and then provide authentication to the PC or mobile device.

"The Super Token concept product is an excellent example of the innovative development work that Rainbow and G&D can accomplish together," said Graham Peat, European marketing manager, Rainbow Technologies . "We believe that we can successfully leverage our combined experience and success in the chip and security technology industries to develop solutions for key strategic markets throughout Europe."