The point is that if you want to use the “Something you have” factor in authentication, then it is worth looking into the method that requires less technology in the customers’ hands, or uses technologies that they might already have, such as a cell phone. The method of sending the OTP to the customer’s cell phone is perhaps the least environmentally damaging of all, assuming that they already own the cell phone.
The same holds true of biometric authentication technologies. The distribution of all those fingerprint readers or their incorporation into devices, such as laptops, is not good for the environment, whereas voice recognition technologies can use existing telephones. That is to say, the “Something you are” authentication factor can be implemented at various levels of eco-friendliness.
I’m not saying that bingo cards are more secure than hardware tokens or that voice authentication technologies are better than fingerprint readers from a security perspective. There are many factors to be evaluated in the overall security equation, including convenience, likelihood of losing or leaving home a token, card or device, and so on. What I am saying is that we should include a review of the greenness of various security technologies in our analyses of different methods.
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I would suggest two things in response to your comments on OTP.
Firstly, the bingo style cards that you speak of are actually less secure than even passwords, as they operate within a much smaller set of finite values. Not to mention that a simple phishing attack would reveal the entire card for future use by any fraudster.
Secondly, newer, greener technologies such as OTP’s generated by software applications on mobile phones and invisible user authentication based on things like device profiling, geo-location, authentication velocity etc. are becoming more popular.
I do agree that greener alternatives need to be considered however I do not believe that bingo cards are the answer.