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GCN Home > 07/31/06 issue

The future of authentication

Other sectors move faster than government on new tools; printable circuits and palm scanning are getting attention

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

If you want to know where authentication technology is going, take a look at what vendors are offering to the health care and financial-services industries.

These heavily regulated sectors often are the first markets approached by companies developing new tools for strong authentication and controlling access to sensitive data.

“The American government really pushes the use of biometrics,” said Klaus G. Schroeter, CEO of the Austrian company Nanoident Technologies AG, which is developing a new multifactor biometric platform.

But the expense of entering the government market and the long acquisition lead time makes the private sector a more attractive area for entry, said Jared Hufferd, vice president of business development for Apere Inc. of San Jose, Calif., which is introducing a new access-control appliance.

“That’s more of a long-term investment,” Hufferd said of the government market. “That won’t be our first target.”

Still, agencies should monitor some of these new technologies being introduced to manage identity and control access.

Organic photonics

Nanoident Technologies specializes in printable organic semiconductors that can produce thin, flexible, inexpensive and integrated circuit devices in large formats. The company recently announced the launch of a new biometrics division and the introduction of a Photonic Solutions Platform.

Conductive organic materials could make the technology small enough and inexpensive enough so that biometrics could be integrated into small devices such has handhelds and smart cards, Schroeter said.

“The material can be produced in liquid form,” he said. “That means we can print semiconductors on almost any surface.”

The printable circuits are built up in layers using ink-jet printers and are not limited to wafer size, as traditional silicon chips are. The new biometric platform incorporates photo emitters and detectors with read-outs for authentication. Nan- oident’s first biometric offering will be an optical fingerprint detector.

But, “fingerprints alone are not a very secure method,” Schroeter said. “We have developed a new multimodel biometric center,” that detects underlying tissue structures as well. “It increases the recognition accuracy” from about 97 percent for prints alone to about 99 percent.

More news on related topics: Hardware, Software Applications, Authentication / Identity Management



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