Keyless Wins Patent for Authentication System That Breaks Biometrics Into ‘Shards’

Keyless Technologies has been granted a US patent for its unique approach to biometric authentication, helping to solidify its position as an innovator in biometric privacy protection.

The biometric industry has hosted a prominent and long-running debate about whether biometric data should be stored on remote servers for user authentication, or stored on-device. But Keyless Technologies’ approach does not store a complete biometric template either way.

Instead, Keyless encrypts a user’s biometric template, and then splits it into “shards”, each of which is stored on a separate server. In other words, the user’s face biometric data – already obscured through the use of cryptography – is broken into a number of puzzle pieces, each of which is hidden in a separate location. This means that a successful hack attack against one server cannot yield a full encrypted biometric template.

End users, meanwhile, can be matched against the entire puzzle any time they perform face-based authentication, with Keyless’s solution designed to put all the shards together to determine a match. Because this approach bypasses the need to store a full biometric template in any location, Keyless says it exceeds the requirements of Europe’s GDPR privacy protection law, and it adheres to PSD2 SCA requirements.

This novel approach to biometric authentication and data protection helped Keyless to raise $3 million in a seed funding round earlier this year that brought its total sum of seed funding to $9.2 million. Soon after that, the company achieved FIDO Certification for its proprietary software, further burnishing its profile as a biometric authentication startup.

Now, the company’s non-provisional patent approval from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office should help to raise its profile even higher. For Keyless’s part, CEO and co-founder Andrea Carmignani framed the patent approval as an important validation for the company.

“Our mission at Keyless is to provide people and organizations with a passwordless future, where the user is the key,” he explained. “We want to do it in a way that lets people login to any app or service, from any device, easily and safe in the knowledge that they have the privacy they deserve, and for organizations to maintain security and compliance for their systems and users. This patent demonstrates our commitment to that mission.”

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October 6, 2021 – by Alex Perala