Samsung plans voice and face biometrics for mobile banking
Sensory Inc., a Silicon Valley company focused on improving the user experience and security of consumer electronics through state-of-the-art embedded voice and vision technologies, and Samsung SDS, a global ICT service provider, today announced a global partnership that will provide customers with a more secure, more convenient way to use mobile banking and enterprise authentication services.
Mobility is a key innovation area for banks and enterprise organizations, but the use of passwords has caused concerns over security and usability. User names and passwords are often too complex and easily forgotten, or too easy to crack, making them insecure. Face and voice biometrics, on the other hand, enable a convenient and highly secure means of authenticating users, without the user needing to remember anything. This partnership between Samsung SDS and Sensory offers financial and enterprise customers a seamless and hassle-free user experience without any lengthy authentication processes.
Samsung’s SDS FIDO® Client product will use Sensory’s FIDO UAF Certified “Authenticators” for face and voice biometrics. As each party has been independently FIDO Certified, the full Samsung SDS experience will be compliant with FIDO UAF guidelines. The Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) specifications have become the de facto standard for simpler and stronger authentication by using the user’s biometrics information and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology to store critical user information on a mobile device and server respectively. Users can open an application or complete a transaction in a secure and frictionless way by simply looking at their front facing camera equipped mobile phone, or by simply stating the selected passphrase when prompted by their mobile device. By fusing Sensory’s face and voice authentication technologies, an added layer of security can be achieved for higher value transactions by requiring both the users face and voice to be verified. Alternatively, by fusing the two biometric modalities, an added level of convenience can be achieved by requiring that only the user’s face or voice be verified. This enables accurate biometric authorization of either the user’s voice in the presence of poor lighting, or their face in intrusive noise, making user authentication accurate, quick and robust to all environmental obstacles. With Sensory’s TrulySecure technology, there is no need for the user to interact with their phone unnaturally to be verified. The user can simply hold and look at their phone as they normally would in order to be authenticated.
Todd Mozer, Sensory’s CEO, stated, “Sensory and Samsung have been working closely for many years in the mobile device and home appliance markets, and we are excited to be expanding our partnership to include mobile payments and authentication for banking and enterprise. Samsung SDS is a leading services supplier in these markets and we are proud to have had our TrulySecure technology selected as their preferred biometrics solution for face and voice authentication.”
James Choi, VP and a leader of Mobile Payment, stated, “We are pleased to be working with Sensory to make their TrulySecure authentication technologies a part of our FIDO Certified solution for global banking and enterprise customers. User authentication and mobile security is gaining more significance in this era of digital banking. Working with Sensory will allow us to innovate more secure solutions for our customers and provide them with the future of digital banking, today.”
