New EyeLock Patent Augments Biometric Security

For those who use or just follow mobile payments, it’s been clear for quite some time now that biometrics are one of the great new options for providing security to such systems. Alongside two-factor authentication, it’s one of the best ways to secure a system thanks to the difficulty of breaking it and the comparative ease of access. EyeLock LLC recently dropped word our way about the newest patent it landed that would help improve on the already powerful protection biometrics offers.

EyeLock’s new patent, number 100,009,178 B2 at last report, uses what’s called a “zero-knowledge proof algorithm.” With such a tool in place, it’s actually possible to use biometric security systems without having to send biometric data. That improves privacy concerns substantially, and makes this already useful tool even better.

That’s not all it can do, though; it allows for greater control at the organizational level by letting users tag certain biometric factors, like a pattern of an iris, for specific network resources. Moreover, users can seriously harm session-hijacking hacking attacks and even slow down the spread of malware by being able to distinguish automated traffic from human-generated traffic.

EyeLock’s chief technology officer Jeff Carter noted “… Data as it traverses a network is at its most vulnerable state as it is a very easy target for any attacker present in the network. Our latest patent brings strong biometric authentication technology to the network layer to provide real-time authorization and human presence assurance for network traffic.”

While the immediate applications for mobile payments might be a bit limited, it’s a safe bet that something like this could be expanded later on. Protecting biometric data is important to ensuring the value of biometric security, so the more that can be done to protect the data, the better the concept can last. The whole point is that no one has it but you; your fingerprints, your irises, are constantly on your person and largely unavailable to any other user. If it becomes possible to just snag these out of records, it would be like people having a digital simulacrum of your thumb.

Biometrics are great for mobile payments, and hopefully, EyeLock’s new patent will make this already-useful security measure even better going forward.