Uproar in the mobile fingerprint market
Mergers, tech giants and massive opportunity defines space
01 July, 2013
category: Biometrics, Digital ID
New solutions
While the new market landscape certainly favors the likes of Validity and Fingerprint Cards AB, the burden still falls to these companies to produce viable solutions.
In the mobile market, Validity touts its Chip on Flex technology. The solution separates the logic from the fingerprint sensor. This gives manufacturers more play in terms of physical implementation of the scanner.
The technology uses a flexible Kapton material – think a reel of movie film – to connect the sensor and logic chip. The fingerprint chip is attached to this flexible circuit board, and in addition to taking up less real estate in the device, the Flex solution is also cheaper to build because it uses less silicon than previous scanner solutions.
Real estate is a primary concern with mobile implementation and as Taveau explains the next step may well bring back a forgotten staple of mobile devices; the button.
The current Validity solution is a swipe-style reader with a thin sensor bar. A button, however, could make the swipe method a thing of the past, according to Taveau.
“When you add another sensor layer perpendicular to the first, you do away with the swipe motion,” he says. “You have the equivalent of a touch technology, you can just touch the sensor area and get the acquisition of a fingerprint template.”
The advantage, however, is that this can be accomplished using far less silicon so costs could be minimized compared to standard area sensors.
Buttons on mobile devices have gone the way of the dodo in recent years, but the logic behind using the button as a fingerprint scanner seems practical. “Waking up your device is a natural thing that every mobile device user does,” explains Taveau. “When you wake up your phone you touch the home or on/off button – an ideal location to implement a fingerprint scanner.”
Consumer interaction with the device is another crucial element to mobile implementation. While the button is one possible solution moving forward, Taveau remains mindful of the touch screen.
Taveau believes that a fully integrated sensor within the heart of the touch screen is the Holy Grail, much better than proposed implementations that locate it beneath the darker perimeter at a device’s bottom edge. It’s a solution that he believes could be a reality in a year or two. For the immediate future, however, swipe and area sensor solutions remain the viable options for mobile implementation.
“Everyone is in a race,” says Taveau. “By the end of the year we will see the first phones coming out.”
Blomquist echoes this sentiment as Fingerprint Cards AB boasts its own line of both area and swipe sensors. “We see 2013 as the break-through year for fingerprint sensors in a number of consumer products, in particular smart phones and mobile phones,” says Blomquist. “Solutions for mobile payment are turning into reality and using fingerprint biometrics will enhance security and convenience for the user.”
Fingerprint Cards AB offers two types of sensors, an area or touch sensor and a swipe sensor. Part and parcel to the company’s sensor offerings is an application-specific processor circuit used for fingerprint matching.
All Fingerprint Cards solutions are capacitive, metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensors that measure the electrical characteristics of the finger to form a 3D finger pattern image.
Harder for Hackers
The strides being made in the integration of biometrics to mobile devices has Taveau – who joined Validity from payments giant PayPal last year – excited for the future.
“Working at PayPal, I saw that mobile authentication was the next big thing,” says Taveau. “The key to mobile security is mobile identity – and mobile identity goes way beyond payments and commerce. It will allow you to do everything.”
With mobile the hope is that security breaches will be better contained, but the introduction of a biometric takes security a step further. “By adding a fingerprint element, every single attack can be linked to one fingerprint on one sensor on one device,” says Taveau. “The mobile device is the lock to the cloud and you are the key.”
This is good news for mobile payments and retailers alike. “Transaction replication is the worst nightmare for retailers as well as for payment providers,” says Taveau. “It costs a lot of time, effort and above all money.”
The power is at your fingertip
Mobile devices equipped with fingerprint scanners are a natural progression for an industry that – along with NFC technology – has put authentication into the hands of the user. “At the end of the day, authentication is moving,” says Taveau.
Before mobile, authentication was done on the service provider side but all that is changing, he explains. “Authentication is shifting to the consumer and consumer devices, leaving service providers to grant the devices access.”
It’s an important trend that will likely reshape mobile wallets, but could affect change beyond payments.
With the surge of bring your own device programs as well as access control initiatives in schools and universities, the use cases for a robust mobile fingerprint solution are certainly evident.
By providing a secure and convenient mobile fingerprint solution, the user can achieve a new level of authority and independence – transcending the traditional notion of identification and moving into the realm of mobile identity.