Biometrics for Artificial Entities

omestic and industrial robots, intelligent software agents, virtual-world avatars, and other artificial entities are being created and deployed in our society for various routine and hazardous tasks, as well as for entertainment and companionship. Over the past ten years or so, primarily in response to the growing security threats and financial fraud, it has become necessary to accurately authenticate the identities of human beings using biometrics. For similar reasons, it may become essential to determine the identities of nonbiological entities. Trust and security issues associated with the large-scale deployment of military soldier-robots [55], robot museum guides [22], software office assistants [24], humanlike biped robots [67], office robots [5], domestic and industrial androids [93], [76], bots [85], robots with humanlike faces [60], virtual-world avatars [109], and thousands of other man-made entities require the development of methods for a decentralized, affordable, automatic, fast, secure, reliable, and accurate means of authenticating these artificial agents. The approach has to be decentralized to allow authority-free authentication important for open-source and collaborative societies. To address these concerns, we proposed [117], [120], [119], [38] the concept of artimetrics—a field of study that identifies, classifies, and authenticates robots, software, and virtual reality agents. In this article, unless otherwise qualified, the term robot refers to both embodied robots (industrial, mobile, tele, personal, military, and service) and virtual robots or avatars, focusing specifically on those that have a human morphology. Virtual worlds populated by software robots are an area of particular concern [123]. A quick investigation of the Second Life virtual world shows that it is populated by organizations posing security