Aware Teams Up With Decentralized Biometrics Specialist Anonybit

Aware, Inc. has become the latest biometrics specialist to partner up with Anonybit, seeking to leverage the latter’s decentralized identity technology.

Anonybit unveiled its lightweight SDK solution early last year. Essentially, it’s designed to take a given biometric template and break it into pieces, which are then stored across a number of nodes in a peer-to-peer network. When an end user’s identity needs to be confirmed, those Anonybit can verify the user’s biometrics against the various puzzle pieces of the biometric template.

The approach helps to ensure privacy, since there central location for a would-be hacker to attack in order to obtain someone’s biometric data. Indeed, there isn’t even a single, coherent biometric template to retrieve – only puzzle pieces scattered across different locations.

For Aware, which offers biometric solutions across multiple modalities, Anonybit’s approach can help to address privacy and data security concerns, and to ensure regulatory compliance.

“Anonybit tackles a key issue for biometric implementations – how to secure the biometric template,” explained Dr. Mohamed Lazzouni, Aware’s Chief Technology Officer. “In an age of privacy first, their approach promises to address the need for greater data protection and frictionless identity assurance. We are delighted to be partnering with them to deliver privacy-preserving identity management solutions to the market.”

In announcing their collaboration, the companies said that it lead to deployments across a number of use cases including access control, time and attendance tracking, and passwordless authentication.

Aware is not the first biometrics specialist to recognize the value of Anonybit’s approach to decentralized identity. In October, FacePhi teamed up with the company. Anonybit CEO Frances Zelazny explained at the time that their collaboration would involve “adapting [FacePhi’s] algorithm in our decentralised identity vault”.

For her part, Zelazny is a seasoned veteran of the biometrics industry, having served as the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer of behavioral biometrics specialist BioCatch from 2016 to 2020. She co-founded Anonybit in November of 2020.

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February 24, 2022 – by Alex Perala