FaceTec says its patent portfolio has reached 50 issued patents with the grant of U.S. Patent 12,699,756, which covers authentication servers built to run without an administrative way in. A further 50 applications are pending, according to the company.
Filed in October 2022 and issued on August 4, the latest patent names FaceTec chief executive Kevin Alan Tussy as inventor, with the company as assignee. It describes a node server that pairs a database of a user’s authentication data with an authentication software development kit, alongside an API that creates and maintains the node and routes payment to the cloud service hosting it.
What distinguishes it is an access module that permanently and irrevocably prevents access from external servers or devices not associated with a user account, once the node has been created and activated. The patent’s background sets out the reasoning. Conventional authentication servers and databases stay reachable by administrative and IT staff accounts, which is useful for updating software, correcting errors and editing records. In a biometric system, the patent argues, that same standing access creates room for manual data manipulation, including validating accounts that should not be validated.
A further grant covering the use of remotely collected biometric images to supplement a database is forthcoming, the company said. FaceTec added two 3D biometric security patents earlier this year and held 48 issued patents in June.
In June, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board upheld every challenged claim across four of the company’s 3D liveness patents in inter partes review proceedings brought by Jumio. Final written decisions in IPR2025-00106, IPR2025-00107, IPR2025-00108 and IPR2025-00109 covered U.S. patents 10,776,471, 11,157,606, 11,693,938 and 11,874,910, and concluded that Jumio had not proved any claim should be invalidated.
Inter partes review is an adversarial proceeding at the patent office in which a petitioner attempts to invalidate issued claims on the basis of prior art, and it is often run in parallel with district court litigation.
FaceTec is asserting the portfolio in court as well. Its patent infringement suit against Jumio, filed in the Northern District of California in June 2024 and assigned to Judge Rita F. Lin, remains active, with filings as recently as this month. The company separately sued iProov over alleged infringement tied to what it described as the UK firm’s participation in FaceTec’s Spoof Bounty Program, and iProov denied the allegations and filed a countersuit.
“FaceTec continues to build its own meaningful patent portfolios through innovation,” Tussy said, describing the company’s in-house US development team as “widening our technology moat.”
FaceTec said its software performed more than 4 billion 3D liveness checks in the last 12 months, for enterprises and governments on six continents. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in the US with staff in the UK, Brazil, Portugal, Mexico and Canada.
Its liveness software cleared presentation attack and injection attack testing across all five levels, in evaluations run by two ISO/IEC 17025-accredited laboratories, BixeLab in Australia and the EU-accredited Ingenium Biometric Laboratories. FaceTec reported a zero percent failure rate across the framework, which covered photographs, high-quality masks, deepfakes and emulator-based attacks. The same technology underpins the Face Check feature on Tinder, which Match Group says cut exposure to deceptive profiles by about 60 percent.
FaceTec has been extending the same biometric binding idea into credentials through UR Codes. These embed digitally signed biometric and biographic data in a scannable QR code, so that a live face scan can confirm the holder is the person the credential describes. They entered proof-of-concept pilots with state motor vehicle agencies, and FaceTec has said UR Codes will remain free to encode for government identity issuers, schools, non-profits, humanitarian organizations and NGOs under an evergreen license.
Sources: PR Newswire, Justia, CourtListener
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
