AutehnTec makes e-commerce more secure

In Japan, many cellular phone users now have to swipe their finger over a thin gold bar to gain access. This is more and more the case with gaining access to PCs and homes’ front doors. The early adopters of fingerprint authentication are Japan and South Korea, but Melbourne, Florida-based AuthenTec is hoping to make the technology ubiquitous. One of AuthenTec’s main goals is to assauge anxieties people have about fingerprints. A major concern about fingerprint biometrics is the possibility of faking or transferring fingerprints. Or worse— in movies and reality alike, the bad guy has been known to cut off someone’s finger to get around the fingerprint security device. AuthenTec’s sensor aims to discourage the removal of fingers to gain secure access.

“It only reads live skin,” AuthenTec representative Brent Dietz told IEEE Spectrum. “So you couldn’t cut off someone’s finger and then use it.” Dietz says other technologies only look at the finger’s surface, which can be adulterated by cuts, oily skin, or worn fingerprints. The company’s sensor (actually, an RF scanner) looks at what Dietz calls the “true fingerprint” in the live skin deep beneath the surface — so deep that you can see individual pores. A lost or stolen phone becomes completely useless. AuthenTec says one in five laptops now ship with its fingerprint sensor.

AuthenTec’s sensors allows for mor secure e-commerce. Here is how it works: You swipe your finger over the sensor to turn your cellular phone on — but this does not allow you to buy anything. To make a purchase, you must graze your finger again, and then you have ten seconds to hold the phone to the short-range RF reader, which authenticates you and sends the transaction over a dedicated leased-line circuit. Even a fingerprint-unlocked phone would not allow transactions in the wrong hands. There is an important obstacle preventing the implementation of the technology in the United States: The lack of a mobile payment infrastructure. In Japan, AuthenTec partners with DoCoMo, a partially government-subsidized cellular provider which serves about half of Japan’s mobile market and provides the wireless infrastructure for mobile commerce. DoCoMo’s combined financial and wireless stake in biometrics technology has no analog in the U.S. wireless market. Wireless carriers simply do not have a real incentive to set up the infrastructure.