In many access control applications such as: border control, immigration, airports and other high security environments, the important point is authentication rather than identification. To prevent unwanted intrusion and to protect an individual's privacy, biometrics authentication methods are more appropriate because of using measurable biological features of an individual to authenticate his/her identity. One of these methods is hand geometry-based authentication method. Hand geometry, as the name suggests, refers to the geometric structure of the human hand that includes: widths of fingers at various locations; width of the hand; lengths of fingers; hand span; and other distinctive geometrical features. The current research work is an initial attempt to draw attention to this important biometric method by designing a prototype personal authentication system using hand geometry method, named as "Hand Geometry-Based Identity Authentication System". This system involves several proposed methods used to extract the hand features from the captured hand images and compare these features with the template of the claimed user's identity that is previously enrolled to the system and stored in the database, obtaining a level of similarity for either confirming or denying the user's claimed identity. This system uses a simple page scanner device for capturing a color hand image when a user has placed his/her hand on" the scanner's flat surface. Initially, preliminary work was performed on the sample database (including 21 images for 7 persons) and tried our proposed algorithms on these images. The experimental results are encouraging enough and we plan to address issues to improve the system performance for future work.