Futurists have long proclaimed the coming of a cashless society,
where dollar bills and plastic cards are replaced by fingerprint and
retina scanners smart enough to distinguish a living, breathing account
holder from an identity thief.
What they probably didn't see coming was that one such technology
would make its debut not in Silicon Valley or MIT but at a small state
college in remote western South Dakota, 25 miles from Mount Rushmore.
Two shops on the School of Mines and Technology campus are
performing one of the world's first experiments in Biocryptology - a mix
of biometrics (using physical traits for identification) and cryptology
(the study of encoding private information). Students at the Rapid City
school can buy a bag of potato chips with a machine that
non-intrusively detects their hemoglobin to make sure the transaction is
legitimate.
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