Fintech startup Aximetria has developed a new biometric voice authentication technology for private keyless authorization of mobile banking transactions.

Digital wallets are typically operated with remote or local storage of a private key, along with a password and possibly additional physical protection, Aximetria says. This raises the possibility of a lost password making a wallet inaccessible, as well as the question of trusting remote storage. Biometrics can partially address this concern, but to perform voice recognition, a database of voice samples is generally used, which is also vulnerable to compromise or attack, according to the announcement.

Aximetria uses a two-level neural network to perform identification on the user’s device, from which the private key is generated. The matching biometrics will generate the correct private key, removing the need for either the private key or biometric data to be stored in a remote database. In this way, the company says, its method effectively functions as keyless technology.

A symmetrical user key, after a signature check, is used to decrypt the user’s voice, revealing the user’s secret, which is combined with a secondary private key to generate the wallet private key for the session. In this way both the symmetrical and the secondary private key can be stored in an external system without the risk of a data breach compromising wallet keys, according to Aximetria.

Among several competing concepts for cryptocurrency wallets, Unikeys recently launched a hardware wallet powered by IDEMIA biometrics, and ZenGo recently implemented FaceTec’s facial recognition for a password-free security architecture.

Article Topics

Aximetria | banking | biometrics | cryptocurrencies | mobile | secure transactions | voice authentication