October 26, 2013 – by Peter B. Counter
This week in biometrics industry news we saw vendors partnering up to bring strong authentication to financial markets, a government funded anti-spoofing initiative in Europe, and biometric screening processes in Canada for visa and permit applicants, not to mention a slew of mobile news over at Mobile ID World.
ImageWare partnered with Global Payout in order to provide cloud based biometric fraud prevention. GoCloudID is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform running on top of Fujitsu’s Global Cloud Platform. This is being applied to Global Payout’s payment gateway service to allow for customizable banking and payment processing under the protection of scalable strong authentication.
Biomertic and finance are friendly bedfellows, with the former’s better-than-PIN protection securing the latter’s critical transactions. A strong market for fraud protection as been showing up in South America recently, with fingerprint protected ATMs being deployed in Brazil. A partnership between Redsis and Fulcrum Biometrics aims to capitalize on this opportunity by distributing terminals that feature Futronic fingerprint sensors, further proliferating the region with better fraud proofing.
The government sector showed up in the news this week too, with the European Union’s funding for the Tabula Rasa consortium showing an initiative to find better methods of spoof protection in fingerprint, face and voice recognition. The international project has been taking place over three years and brings 12 concerned parties, including companies like Morpho (Safran), to conduct research in improving the state of biometric protection. Included in this initiative is a spoofing challenge in which the participants use any and all (and many hilarious)means necessary to fool a variety of leading sensor solutions.
On the application end of government biometrics, the Canadian government has enlisted Aware Inc. to provide its BioSP platform to be used in the biometric screening process that as of December of this year will need to be undertaken by visa and permit applicants from a list of 30 countries.
Meanwhile, at our sister site Mobile ID World, fingerprint sensors from Fingerprint Cards AB have been included on a newly launched phablet in Korea, while Apple’s newest iPad, announced on Tuesday, doesn’t feature any built-in biometric protection. This illustrates an important distinction in mobility and size versus the need for strong end user authentication: with physical point of sale applications in the works that depend on a pocket-sized biometric solution for payment protection, a large (albeit thin) tablet like the iPad Air has less necessity. That said, online transactions can surely benefit from post-password security, so this omission will have Apple adopters waiting for a while until they and online shop without anxiety.
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