The German company BioID  has announced the world’s first Biometric Authentication as a Service (BaaS) — a multimodal biometric service on demand that provides an easy to use, fast and secure biometric authentication without the hassles and risks of user IDs and passwords. The technology revolutionizes online authentication and digital identity management for consumers, businesses and government organizations.

BioID verifies the identity of a user by means of advanced multimodal biometric recognition techniques (face, iris, voice, or any combination of the three) instead of user IDs and passwords. Biometric traits provide a strong link between a physical person and his or her digital identities, because human characteristics such as face, iris and voice can’t be forged, lost, shared, or stolen. They are unique the same way the individual is unique.

BioID’s Authentication Service provides biometric web “single sign-on” (SSO) based on “OpenID” and other federated identity systems. OpenID is an internet-scale identity system with over one billion user accounts and widely supported by leading companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, MySpace, Sears, Universal Music Group, France Telecom, Novell, Sun, Telecom Italia, and many more.

“BioID’s Biometrics as a Service platform offers high availability and dependability, is in accordance with security best practices, and provides clearly defined biometric and other security features,” said Ho Chang, BioID CEO. “Enabling customers to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their authentication data is of the utmost importance to BioID, as is maintaining trust and confidence.”

Chang emphasizes that BioID’s Biometric Authentication Service addresses two key security concerns, namely privacy and phishing attacks. BioID is a user-managed identity service enabling biometric authentication. Users decide which information to share with whom, and for how long. Users can stop information sharing anytime with sites they no longer trust. BioID’s unique multimodal biometric technology requires users to participate throughout the authentication process and hence reduces the risk of “man-in-the-middle” attacks.

“One of the key features of our BioID service is to confirm the user presence at every login by means of face recognition,” Chang said. “This is a powerful feature to plug the hole of the infamous ‘someone else used my computer’ problems and to manage service session effectively.”

 

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