Newly formed Hoyos Labs looks to revolutionize biometric authentication
09 December, 2013
category: Biometrics, Corporate, Digital ID
Biometrics veteran Hector Hoyos has launched a new venture, Hoyos Labs, which hopes to rethink how biometrics is used to authenticate and secure identity.
Hoyos Labs is a digital infrastructure security company that along with the Cambridge Innovation Center, maintains its own research and development division on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Hoyos’ has ambitions for a completely secured world, wherein online and offline identities cannot be hacked or stolen. En route to this vision, Hoyos Labs developed an solution for identity authentication that leverages biometrics as a key component in the authentication process.
Having already received $10 million in funding, Hoyos Labs has created identity assertion products that use a multi-biometric recognition system that includes the face, iris and periocular region — the area around the eye — to confirm identity. Hoyos’ technology uses smart phones as biometric acquisition devices on the front-end, then interacts with middleware and accesses the back-end before authenticating the identity.
Hoyos’ system tackles “liveness,” which detects the presence of a real person from an image or video in a quick and simple manner. Hoyos is offering its own, proprietary front-end biometric matching technology, but key for the company is its ability to be “biometric agnostic,” meaning that Hoyos’ back-end technology can pair seamlessly with any biometric technology currently on the market. This also includes the use of identity data generated by outside vendors, which can be approved and matched by the Hoyos system.
Hoyos systems can be used to authenticate and grant access to an unlimited number of web sites, software systems, doors or vehicles, as well as grant access to any area of object that needs to be opened, closed, or turned-on or off. This includes everything from Facebook logins to online bank accounts to automobiles. From the end user’s perspective, the only requirement is a smartphone and the Hoyos technology itself.
Hoyos Labs is currently headed by its namesake owner, Hector Hoyos, who has a long-standing history in biometrics as well as security and defense products. Hoyos is also responsible for the HBOX and EyeSwipe biometrics identity authentication solutions and previously founded EyeLock Corp.
