EyeVerify says that their technology allows them to identify you by the unique patters of blood vessels within your peepers. The company, which launched last year, believes that their product could succeed where so many other biometric verification methods haven't, and might be the solution to the password problem.
A Live Authentication
"Passwords fail for two reasons," said EyeVerify's CEO and Founder Toby Rush to SecurityWatch. "Because we're terrible at creating passwords, and there's no 'live-ness' test." While a password manager can solve the first problem of weak or repeated passwords, there's no way to determine whether the person entering the password is who they claim to be—"live-ness."
EyeVerify believes it can solve both problems. In terms of strength and accuracy, Rush said that their technology was recently validated by a third-party as being on par with fingerprints – that is, less than one in 10,000 false rejects.
Live-ness is a little more complicated. In The Avengers, for instance, Loki scans the eye of a wealthy plutocrat in order to gain access to a vault. Rush says that could never happen with EyeVerify because it uses streaming video, not still images, to identify the patterns of blood vessels.
"We tell the camera to do different things," Rush explained, such as change the white balance of the image or the frame rate at random. The software also recognizes the different absorption rates of light in the eye versus on a monitor, meaning that the system wouldn't be fooled, "even if you had an exact video of sequence."
We've seen plenty of biometric security systems before, but EyeVerify believes that it can gain wider acceptance because it requires no special hardware. Instead, the software is designed to run on smartphones—both iOS and Android—that have at least a 2MP camera. "We're leveraging the devices they already have," said Rush.
Giving a Voice
The company has already begun partnering with companies, including password managers and banks, but Rush sees possibilities far beyond mere secondary authentication for web services. "It's a genetic bio-marker clearly visible in the whites of their eyes," he said. "It's independent of ethnicity, gender, race, and has no language barriers."
Rush sees applications in healthcare, where patients can prove their identity to access health records, or academic testing and certification so educators know exactly who is in the seat taking an exam. The software could also be deployed to help include the millions of individuals who exist without officials records, such as refugees. "The poor want to have a name, they want to have an identity," said Rush.
Unfortunately, passwords are likely to always be a part of identification and security systems. However, systems like EyeVerify and other biometric identifiers can do more than authenticate; they can clearly determine who is accessing what and where. With more and more high-profile attacks making the headlines, look for this kind of technology rolling out soon.
Image via Flickr user Grégoire Lannoy
