Biometrics makes pizza-making infrastructure more reliable

Posted by Ken Y-N on May 26th, 2008 at 12:03am

One of the the pioneering applications for the Trusted Computing Group’s (TCG) initiatives was implemented at a large New England-based pizza chain. Paul Korzeniowski of Dark Reading wrote up the details of what went on at Papa Gino’s.

The problem that Papa Gino’s had was that every year when it came time to collect information from all their 170 restaurants many people had forgotton their passwords, other staff had left, and so one, so they had to employ masses of temps to recreate the undecryptable data, running into the many thousands of files.

So, along came the TCG’s Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which allowed computers to be configured so it was a biometric rather than a password that unlocked the system. When they evaluated vendors, HP and IBM’s solutions had certain limitations, so it was Dell they chose as having the most open and robust TPM implementation. Combined with software from Wave Systems that allows centralised management and backup of devices, in the spring of 2005 they started to roll out TPMs.

When they started out the TPM chip was about $40 per computer; now Dell include it in the price of all systems, and Papa Gino’s are looking now to get their TPMs onto their BlackBerries.

Read the full story at the Dark Reading web site here.

Tags: biometrics, dell, papa gino, wave

Under TCG Tags: biometrics, dell, papa gino, wave