Deep-Dive Into the $100K Biometric Spoof Bounty with FaceTec CEO Kevin Alan Tussy (Part 2)

FaceTec – the renowned provider of FaceTec 3D Face Authentication – is known as a pioneer in biometric liveness detection. Its flagship technology made headlines over recent years around the cause of the transparent evaluation of presentation attack detection (PAD) in the biometrics industry. Early in the company’s crusade, third party lab testing was the benchmark, but as the fraud threats continue to mount in the wake of accelerating digital transformation, the company has turned to a more proactive evaluation tactic: a spoof bounty.

First announced a year ago as a three-level bounty program with the potential to pay up to $30,000, FaceTec upped the ante this summer, adding two more levels and increasing the payouts to a potential total of $100,000. To dig into the rationale behind the enhanced spoof bounty program, FindBiometrics interviewed FaceTec CEO Kevin Alan Tussy (please see part one.). In part two of our conversation, Tussy discusses industry reactions to the biometric spoof bounty and what the future holds for the program.

Read part two of FindBiometrics’ Interview with Kevin Alan Tussy, CEO, FaceTec:

Peter Counter, Editor in Chief, FindBiometrics: How has the market reacted to the spoof bounty program?

Kevin Alan Tussy, CEO, FaceTec: If winning business is any indicator, it’s been great. We’ve now signed for six major government integrations, have hundreds of customers on six continents and hundreds more organizations currently testing, and are now processing tens-of-millions of Liveness Checks every month. In fact, at our current growth rate, we expect over 200M unique users to perform Liveness Checks on our platform in the next 12 months.

We are also very encouraged by our partner growth as more are joining the FaceTec army every month. Our current 45 global partners love the spoof bounty program because it shows that we are always pushing to achieve greater and greater levels of security, and it gives them confidence that we are battle-tested when providing our tech to their customers and end-users.

As far as competitors, and the old guard in biometrics, I don’t think many actually understand how much better we actually perform. I think most people who’ve been around this industry for a while think, “Everyone in biometrics exaggerates their performance, and many just flat out lie”. But at FaceTec, if anything, we publish conservative numbers, and there are no gimmicks in our bounty program. Our UI is wide open, even more so than a normal customer’s would be because the bounty program doesn’t have timed lockouts like most production integrations.

The 3D FaceMap^™ we invented has at least ten times more Liveness signal than a 2D photo or video, and that’s why FaceTec is so far ahead in Level 1-5 Anti-Spoofing. But it’s also very important to understand that our 3D FaceMap enables FaceTec to be more than 1,000% more accurate at 1:1 & 1:N Face Matching. 

FindBiometrics: Your 3D Liveness is definitely resonating in the market, but can you please explain the implications your 3D face data has for matching? How would using FaceTec’s 3D FaceMaps influence an organization’s long term biometric authentication strategy?

FaceTec: Let’s say, for example, that a competitor of ours could somehow create Liveness that rivaled FaceTec’s. Well, they are still doing their customers a disservice by selling it because they are limiting them to a future of 2D matching. That’s a huge problem for the customer because they miss out on the opportunity to upgrade their 2D database user-by-verified user to 3D FaceMaps. Back in 2017, many companies thought that neural networks were going to take 2D matching to real-world accuracy levels that were good enough for face authentication, but they didn’t. Like everything in biometrics, the first gains on the logarithmic scale came fast and easy, but they stalled before becoming accurate enough to be relied upon for digital identity. Our 3D matching doesn’t have this problem; we are already more than 1,000% percent more accurate than 2D, and FaceTec is still in the early stages of the logarithmic scale. We had a 300% gain in accuracy just in the last year.

A 2D photo vs. FaceTec’s 3D is similar to the difference between a painting and a statue. The former is locked into a single perspective, while the latter is a far more complete representation of the original subject. In fact, with a 3D FaceMap we can recreate any face photo that has ever been taken of the human subject with a similar expression. Apple knows this, and that’s why Face ID uses an infrared 3D camera. They don’t put $45 worth of special hardware in their phones for no reason; they do it because in real-world performance, 3D Liveness and matching dominates 2D. And 3D doesn’t rely on the characteristics of the skin nearly as much, so 3D doesn’t exhibit the same racial and gender bias that 2D face matching algorithms do.

Rather than hopelessly kicking the dead 2D horse, we encourage legacy biometric vendors to partner with us, like Gemalto/Thales did, to bring 3D Liveness to their customers and future-proof their photo databases by appending 3D FaceMaps to the user’s record once they’ve been matched against the 2D photo on file for the user.

FindBiometrics: What do you see for the future of the bounty program?

FaceTec: This will be an ongoing bounty program that continues to develop as needed to increase the effectiveness of our Liveness Detection AI. We believe that end-users deserve real biometric security, not gimmicks or hollow conformances, so we’ll continue to be tech and thought leaders in the space and voice our strong, hard-won opinions on Liveness, Face Authentication and digital identity. We are obsessed with biometric security, and we constantly push the bar higher, and we’ll keep putting our money where our mouth is with our spoof bounties, while encouraging other vendors to do the same.

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Learn more about the $100,000 spoof bounty program in Part 1 of this interview.