Advanced biometric authentication tech developed

By Yoon Sung-won

Korean researchers have developed new biometric personal authentication technology that recognizes and analyzes multiple user information and context, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) said Wednesday.

The institute said the technology, dubbed Fast IDentity Online (FIDO), will be widely adopted not only for online and mobile financial services but also for more diverse new industries such as the Internet of Things (IoT), online-to-offline (O2O) and smart vehicles.

It also expected the upgraded FIDO technology will expedite replacement of old-fashioned passwords used to secure financial services.

“To strengthen security for next-generation financial technology services, we need to secure key technologies including the FIDO biometric authentication as well as artificial intelligence (AI), abnormal financial transaction detection based on big data analysis and blockchain,” said Jin Seung-heon, vice president of ETRI’s Information Security Research Division.

ETRI has started distributing the FIDO technology, which provides diverse personal authentication through fingerprint and iris recognition as well as integrated circuit cards, to 21 fintech and security companies since last year.

Users can put their fingerprints on a sensor on their handset to verify their identities for online shopping services through Bluetooth technology, the researchers said.

ETRI researchers stressed that FIDO 2.0 adopts a new technology called “context-awareness authentication.” It is designed to monitor user information such as face, motion, geographic location and key input through multiple mobile device sensors, and then analyze the information through machine-learning methods to ultimately identify the user.

In this way, users can prevent unauthorized access by others trying to steal their account passwords.

ETRI also said FIDO 2.0 can be used on the Windows operating system run on personal computers, unlike the previous version which is available only on smartphones.

ETRI said it seeks global standardization of FIDO 2.0 technology. It is in discussions with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the FIDO Alliance for the process.

The institute said it is planning a technology transfer to the private sector to commercialize it once the global standardization standard is set next year.

“ETRI’s development of FIDO 2.0, which will be one of the key security technologies in the fintech service sector, is expected to help Korean companies enter the global market,” an official at the Institute for Information & Communications Technology Promotion said. “We hope ETRI continues to push for development of next-generation core technologies such as context-awareness authentication.”