About the Biometric Authentication category
What belongs in this category
The Biometric Authentication category covers products that use a person's physical or behavioral traits to confirm who they are when they sign in, approve a transaction or reach a system. Typical entries include face, fingerprint, palm, iris and voice recognition, behavioral biometrics such as typing patterns, and liveness detection that tells a real person from a photo, mask, recording or deepfake.
Checking a person's identity documents at onboarding fits Identity Verification (IDV), and stopping deepfake impersonation in calls and video fits Social Engineering and Deepfake Defense. A biometric product used as a second factor or to replace passwords can also enter Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) or Passwordless Authentication.
Related categories to enter
Each category is judged separately, so you can enter a product in every category that matches what it does, with a separate nomination for each. Tailor each nomination to that category's focus. Entering several related categories gives the product more than one chance to be recognized.
How entries are judged
An independent jury of security practitioners, analysts and CISOs scores each nomination on leadership, innovation and impact. Each nomination competes in its category against organizations of similar size and region, so a mid-sized firm is not ranked against a global enterprise. Your entry package, any sponsorship and public votes do not affect the jury's scores.
Strong entries in this category show:
- Leadership — trust in demanding settings: people enrolled, regulated customers such as banks or governments, independent testing of accuracy and spoof resistance against recognized standards.
- Innovation — a biometric problem solved in a new way, such as resisting deepfakes and fake images fed straight into the camera stream (injection attacks), working across devices and lighting conditions, or keeping biometric data private.
- Impact — results for customers: false accept and false reject rates (impostors let in, real users turned away) at production volumes, spoofing attempts stopped, fraud reduced, sign-in time saved. Give figures from deployments.
The jury awards Gold, Silver or Bronze, or a Finalist badge, and results are published on this site and announced to the 600,000+ member Cybersecurity Insiders community. Every approved nomination also enters the separate Community Choice award, decided by public votes.
How to enter
A vendor can enter its own product or service, and a PR agency can enter it on a client's behalf. The nomination form has a confidential field for detail that is shared with the judges and not published, such as customer names, deployment figures or roadmap. Deadlines, pricing and entry steps are on the How it Works page.
