the present invention discloses a system and a method for authenticating a user based upon a spoken password processed though a standard speech recognition engine lacking specialized speaker identification and verification capabilities . it should be noted that the standard speech recognition grammar can be capable of acoustically generating speech recognition grammars in accordance with the cross referenced application indicated herein . the invention can prompt a user for a free - form password and can receive a user utterance in response . the utterance can be processed through a speech recognition engine to generate an acoustic baseform . future user utterances can be matched against the acoustic baseform . results from the future matches can be used to determine whether to grant the user access to a secure resource .