Biometric Authentication Contemporary Trends and Systemic FailuresA Review

Abstract

Biometric authentication has gone beyond a niche security technology and is now the standard identity layer in a smartphone, banking app, border control, and national identity programs. This review aims to describe the state-of-the-art of biometric authentication and the common failure modes of biometric systems by collating the peer-reviewed literature, standards documentation, government evaluations and documented incident reports from approximately 2015 to 2026. The five trends are serverside matching is becoming obsolete and giving way to on-device cryptographically bound verification, the trend towards multimodal and continuous authentication is gaining traction, industrialization of remote identity proofing is increasing, generative AI is becoming a growing attack vector and defense, and regulation is becoming consolidated. Failure is broken down into five categories presentation and injection attacks, demographic performance gaps, irreversible data breaches, operational and human factor failures, and governance failures. The main conclusion is that failures of matching accuracy are not the main cause of biometric failures, rather, they are failures of system architecture, evaluation practice and institutional oversight. The review finds that the direction of the field is less about the advancement of recognition algorithms and more about the ability to verify the provenance of the input, the requirement for disaggregated evaluation and irrevocability by design of biometric data.