Biometric IAM Provider BIO-key Granted Patent for Method of Enhancing Performance of Small Fingerprint Sensors
Wall, NJ, May 18, 2017 – BIO-key International, Inc. (OTCQB: BKYI), an innovative provider of biometric software and hardware solutions for strong and convenient user authentication, today reported that the company was granted US Patent # 9,646,146 for the Utilization of Biometric Data.
The patented method enables BIO-key and its licensees to leverage existing small area sensors to capture substantially more fingerprint surface area, leading to a higher degree of accuracy when performing a match. Better accuracy leads to superior end user experiences, and for the first time, provides a means for higher security fingerprint authentication scenarios using small area sensors. BIO-key’s innovation will allow device manufacturers, application creators, enterprises, and most importantly, end users, to place more trust in the security of smaller fingerprint scanners.
Small area sensors capture only partial fingerprints, impacting the reliability of biometric matching, and preventing interoperable matching between small sensors and full size sensors. A small area sensor may be used as a touch sensor for simple on-device authentication, but security concerns have emerged to limit the trust in small sensors for higher stakes scenarios. Small sensors’ “partial print” vulnerability was demonstrated in a widely publicized April 6, 2017 IEEE report by researchers at New York University and Michigan State University, entitled” MasterPrint: Exploring the Vulnerability of Partial Fingerprint-based Authentication Systems,” which exploited small sensors’ limited capture area to achieve imposter matches. BIO-key’s innovation overcomes the area limitations of small sensors by enabling the capture of more data using the existing small sensor as a dynamic area capture device when needed. As always, BIO-key’s flexible and interoperable capabilities gives customers the option of matching on-device or in the cloud, and interoperably across a variety of different sensor devices.
“Nearly every device manufacturer is including fingerprint biometric authentication as a security and convenience option for their customers”, stated Mira LaCous, BIO-key’s Chief Technology Officer. “Before BIO-key’s innovation, they had to make difficult tradeoffs between sensor area footprint and accuracy. This patent and BIO-key’s IP behind it is intended to deliver the best of both worlds – enterprise-level security via sensor sizes that are unobtrusive and esthetically pleasing.”
About BIO-key International, Inc. (www.bio-key.com)
BIO-key is revolutionizing authentication with our biometric solutions enabling convenient and secure access to information and securing high-stakes transactions. We offer alternatives to passwords, PINs tokens and cards to make it easy for enterprises and consumers to secure their devices as well as information in the cloud. Our premium finger scanning devices, including SideSwipe, SideTouch, EcoID and SidePass offer market-leading quality, performance and price. Now anyone can BIO-key their world!
