QUANTITATIVE INSTRUMENT FOR MEASURING THE ACCEPTABILITY OF IRIS BIOMETRIC AUTHENTICATION APPROACH IN PUBLIC PLACES

The world has turned to a global village via information technology (IT). The innovation has paved ways for ubiquitous access to IT-driven services. The fast growing and dynamic world of information technology has called for fast responding and reliable security devices. The singular fact is that almost all business data are now being converted into an electronic form which requires us to protect such information from some unethical persons who are always exploring possibilities of gaining illegal access to the information. There is serious security threat with the conventional Personal Identification Number (PIN) entry system most especially in developing nations with series of socio-economic problem. This led to the suggestion of iris-based biometric authentication to guarantee maximum authentication security in all domains. This paper discusses the development of the quantitative instrument (questionnaire) for measuring user’s behavioural intention to use iris-based authentication in public places using Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) as the underpinning theory. The items of the instrument were gathered from both the previous adoption theories and the previous scholarly works on iris biometric identifier. The tangible end product here is the final instrument. The reliability of the constructs is also discussed. Keywords-Acceptability, Quantitative, Instrument, iris-base, biometric, authentication 1.0 Background to the study Authentication can also be defined as a means of verifying or confirming that someone or something is who or what is claimed to be. Within the context of computer networks including internet, authentication is mostly achieved via the use of logon passwords, where the knowledge of the password is assumed to confirm the authenticity of the user. The major weakness of this approach most especially for security-critical system such as exchange of money is that the password can be stolen, accidentally revealed or forgotten. This among other factors called for the need to provide a more stringent and secured authentication approach for the emerging sensitive ubiquitous transactions [3, 13]. In Nigeria, where corruption is at its peak due to series of socio-economic crisis, it has been recommended that the introduction of biometric features for public authentication will go a long way in reducing the corruption level and at the same time resulting into socio-economic growth of the country [11]. The author stressed further that there should be inclusion of biometric trait for getting access to banking services via ATM. It is recently revealed that the victims of ATM unauthorized withdrawals in Nigeria have teamed up and they have sued the central bank of Nigeria (CBN), 24 Nigerian commercial banks and the interswitch (the company responsible for inter connectivity among both Nigerian and international banks to pay a sum of fifty (50) billion naira as the general damages for the withdrawals, 2.5 million naira as the money lost to the withdrawals, 100 million naira as the cost of litigation and lastly 10 million naira as the cost of providing notice to the defendants[19]. Research on technology acceptance and diffusion becomes very crucial as it provides pre information on how organizations can benefit from the introduction and use of IT [31]. Similarly, it was revealed that no matter how robust an information technology is, it can only be profitable if such technology is accepted and used [30]. Nevertheless, the beauty of information technology does not come without its inherent problem. It was reported that International Journal of Science and Advanced Technology (ISSN 2221-8386) Volume 1 No 2 April 2011 http://www.ijsat. com 23 Privacy Rights Clearing House revealed that since 2005, over 93 million data records of U.S residents have been exposed as a result of data security breaches [13]. Such profile cases within corporate America and the U.S government have exposed a glaring vulnerability within organizations; such difficulty in keeping sensitive data secured called for stronger user authentication. Similarly, observed that there is an urgent need to come out with a reliable identity management system so as to reduce the epidemic growth in identity theft and as well for meeting the emerging security demands in a variety of applications [4]. This among others security problem associated with using information technology approach for public service delivery has proved the need for a more secured approach of interacting with public terminals. Additionally, In Nigeria where corruption is at its peak due to series of socio-economic crisis, it has been recommended that the introduction of biometric features will go a long way in reducing the corruption level and at the same time resulting into socio-economic growth of the country [11]. The author stressed further that there should be inclusion of biometric trait for getting access to banking services via ATM. Several researchers have proposed biometric identification as the alternative to the inherent problems of both token-based and knowledge-based authentication. Token-based authentication approach is a means of identifying an individual based on the evidence of holding a tangible token like identity card while knowledge-based authentication approach is a means of verifying identity based on having knowledge of something like password. It then becomes necessary to determine the acceptance of such authentication technology. This research work has to do with determination of user’s acceptance of a more secured, novel approach of authenticating user’s identity while using public zone’s terminals (iris-based approach) using empirical method. Though, there are different forms of iris-based authentication methods proposed by a number of researchers [10, 12, 15, 16] in this study, iris-based authentication is going to be universally considered without being specific about a particular iris processing method. This is to give a universal view based on general characteristics of human iris as a biometric identifier. The motivation for designing the instrument came from two angles, first, the fact that there are only few studies of technology adoption on public usage [18]. The second reason for developing a specific instrument is for the fact that previous studies have linked the delay in the implementation of iris authentication to certain constraints like impossibility of working with eye glasses, relatively small distance allowed, wrong positioning, fear eye damage and fear of misuse of the iris image [2, 5, 9, 18, 22, 23]. Items added in this respect makes the designed instrument specific for measuring acceptance of iris authentication in public places not even within an organization. 2.0 Materials and Methods 2.1 Instrument Design It gives the findings of quantitative studies more validity if the items that constitute the instrument are product of research outputs from various points of view in a given domain of study [20]. In line with this, all the items of the questions are evidenced from a number of sources of literature. For the UTAUT constructs, the main items are adapted and reframed to suite this domain of study; other items are from the result of content analysis from previous studies. The development of the main survey instrument in this study is guided by the underpinning theory UTAUT and the relevant literatures. Out of the six dimensions of behavioural intention, Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Social Influence (SI) and Facilitating Condition (FC) are contained in the original UTAUT [31] where ]only Attitude (ATT) and Anxiety (ANX) are the newly included dimensions studies [6, 8, 14, 25, 28, 29, 30]. Self-Efficacy (SEF) is also added as an effect variable to establish the correlation between self-efficacy and effort expectancy in this domain of technology diffusion [5, 14, 28, 27]. For every construct in the research instrument, a dummy item is included to discover the seriousness of the respondents in filling the questionnaire so as to determine the usability at individual respondent’s level. Table 1 contains the discussion on how the items for each of the constructs are developed. The final instrument is shown in Table II. 2.1. 1 Performance Expectancy (PE): This measures the degree to which an individual perceives that using the system could help improve his or her performance. Items under PE are constructed both from the theory, UTAUT and from the relevant literatures. The first four items of the construct, PE1, PE2, PE3 and PE4 are adapted from [31] and only reframed to suite this domain of study. This is supported with previous related studies [8, 27, 28, 29]. The fifth item, PE5 is constructed from the view of [18] while the sixth item, PE6 is constructed around a number of studies as well [1, 3, 7, 13, 15, 17, 22, 24, 26]. Lastly, the last item in this construct, PE7 is derived from the studies of [2] and [26]. 2.1. 2 Effort Expectancy (EE): This measures the degree to which an individual perceives the system will be easy to use or the degree of associated ease with the use of a system. For the EE construct, a total of five items are constructed for this dimension where all the five items, EE1, EE2, EE3, EE4 and EE5 are equally adapted from [31] and supported by various studies [8, 27, 28, 29]. The items are similar to that of the conventional perceived ease of use construct of [8]. The items are shown in Table II. International Journal of Science and Advanced Technology (ISSN 2221-8386) Volume 1 No 2 April 2011 http://www.ijsat. com 24 2.1. 3 Social Influence (SI): This measures the degree to which an individual perceives that the person who she cares about feel that she should use the new system. The third dimension of the study, SI construct is made up of six main items where the first three items, SI1, SI2, SI3 and SI4 are adapted from the original UTAUT [31] supported by other studie