Passfaces adds four partners, expands to Europe

Chalk up another success for Annapolis, Maryland-based Passfaces. Readers may recall our previous report on the company’s arrangement with ContactWorks, a customer contact management firm, to supply it with its unique “reverse biometrics” approach that asks users to recall a particular series of presented photographs. (See details in blue box below.) We can now report that the technology has attracted the attention of four additional companies, all of whom have signed on as official resellers.

The new partner companies are Bavelle Technologies Group (consulting), Coast to Coast Financial Services (identity theft protection for credit unions and banks), Data Compliance Solutions (compliance consulting), and Istanbul, Turkey-based Ergosis, Passfaces’s first international reseller (integrated solutions). “Our new channel partners deal with a broad range of clients, including financial and healthcare institutions that need to comply with regulatory requirements as well as, protect network data and intellectual property,” said Passfaces CEO Paul Barrett. “Our technology will now be readily available to even more industry sectors and, for the first time, to companies throughout Europe.”

-read more in this company news release

How it works

Passfaces’s technology may be best described as reverse biometrics. Instead of using a computer to judge whether a particular employee is who he claims he his, the system relies on the human brain’s own natural ability to recall the faces of others. Infants, for instance, are able to recognize their mother after only two days, and the adult mind can distinguish familiar faces within only twenty thousandths of a second. Even after thirty-five years, humans can recognize childhood schoolmates with 90 percent accuracy. A key point to keep in mind: identifying human faces relies on recognition, not recall.

An employee using Passfaces’s technology is provided a password of three to seven new faces. Enrollment takes less than five minutes and is followed by a series of tests to acquaint the user both with the system and with the faces he will need to recognize (to pass he must get through at least four iterations of practice without picking a decoy). When accessing the system, he is presented with a 3 x 3 grid of randomly ordered faces and simply points his cursor in order to the faces in his password.

Passface technology contains a number of advantages that distinguish it from regular alphanumeric passwords. It cannot be written down, it cannot be given to another person, and it does not rely on the human brain’s fallible memory. According to the company, the odds of a person correctly guessing the password is one chance in 59,049, much better than the one chance in 10,000 of someone guessing a four digit ATM PIN number.