Recommendations for Biometric Access Control System Deployment in a Vehicle Context in South Africa

Motor vehicles are valuable assets to us in modern life. Those of us that are fortunate enough to own one, have the ability to quickly obtain transport to wherever we need to be. Since these are such prized possessions, they are also in high demand with criminals who would break into vehicles to steal either the vehicle contents or the vehicles themselves. High rates of vehicle break-ins and theft show that vehicles remain vulnerable in terms of access control. This purpose of this paper is to find out whether there is something we can do to improve the security of vehicle access control. We look at existing access control implementations and discuss the results of the survey we distributed in order to get high-level respondent preferences and opinions for token and biometric-based vehicle access control. Among our results, we find that roughly a third of our respondents have experienced vehicle-related crime, and that there is a marked respondent preference for fingerprint biometrics in improving the security of access control to their vehicles. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations for a token and biometric authentication approach for improving access control in vehicles.