Your Arizona Driver’s License Could Be Stored Someday on Your Smartphone (Phoenix New Times)
Delaware aims to be 1st with digital driver’s licenses (USA Today)
So, which will it be? Or, will some other state beat them both?
Saygus V2 smartphone: Android with a fingerprint reader
First impressions: Saygus V2, the phone with 320GB storage (Times of India)
The right edge of the phone sports all hardware buttons(volume rocker, power and camera shutter) and a fingerprint sensor as well as a 60GHz mobile beaming transmitter.
The fingerprint reader appears to be one of the models where the user slides their finger across the sensor. The linked piece has a lot of photos and a review.
The AP explains smartphone fingerprint biometrics
It’s not bulletproof security, but it’s more secure than existing methods, he says. Despite the risks, Bennett says he sees potential. — “If it results in more people locking their phone,” he says, “it improves security.”
Eye biometrics with a mobile phone camera
Mobile technology is crying out for better user authentication. Fingerprints would seem like a good match, but there’s a hardware chicken-and-egg problem: no fingerprint sensor hardware means no apps and no apps means no manufacturer has decided (long-term) to drive up the cost of their handset to provide a feature few may use.
That means biometric app developers interested in verification using mobile devices have concentrated on modalities that can use the sensors that are already ubiquitous in mobile hardware.
A phone without a microphone isn’t a phone anymore so the developers of voice biometrics are in pretty good shape. And though a camera isn’t a strictly necessary feature on a mobile device, they all seem to have them. That invites facial recognition, and eye-based biometrics developers into the mobile world.
All three (face, eye, voice) face challenges.
Scan Eyes to unlock spartphones (PSFK)
If I’m reading this article correctly, or more accurately making the correct inference from the picture that accompanies it*, EyeVerify seems to be side-stepping the challenges associated with iris biometrics and camera resolution by switching to an analysis of sclera vasculation — the veins on the white part — for mobile verification.
That’s pretty cool.
See also:
Mobile Devices and Biometric Modalities
* According to the EyeVerify site, that was the correct inference.
Unlock Your Phone With Voice Biometrics
Nuance’s Dragon ID lets you unlock your phone by voice (GigaOM)
While typical phone unlocking programs require tapping in a short code or tracing a pattern on screen, Nuance’s technology uses two layers of security: biometrics, which recognizes your unique “voice imprint,” and a password or pass phrase – which in this case is spoken not typed, said Kenneth Harper, Senior Product Manager, Nuance. Nuance has been selling the technology for years to businesses and governments for use in their own biometric security systems – with 20 million voice prints on file – but this is the first time it’s offering up its technology to consumer phones and tablets.
Pretty cool.