You can forget your passwords but you can't forget your appendages. You can steal a user ID but you can't steal a finger—at least not that easily. That is the beauty of biometric authentification.
On Monday, Pay By Touch announced both software and hardware that will allow users to authenticate themselves to any secure Web site using their index fingers. The touchpad comes embedded into the new Lenovo ThinkPads, or as a USB attachment to be used with any notebook or desktop PC.
The new system is called TrueMe and it is Pay By Touch's first online authentification service. Pay By Touch is the same company that has installed finger pad payment systems in over 2,400 stores in 44 states that allows users to pay for merchandise from a checking account or credit card account using their fingerprint.
"All of our services have been provided in brick-and-mortar retail, but on Monday we're announcing the first services that will be available on the Web," said Jon Siegal, executive vice president at Pay By Touch. "One of the major problems we're solving is that user IDs and passwords are insufficient to authenticate identity for a number of people. We all have too many user IDs and passwords."
Pay By Touch's research showed that most people have an average of 15 to 20 different user IDs and passwords for various online accounts. (When I counted mine, I found that I have 76 different accounts that I keep in an Excel spreadsheet!) With TrueMe, users can replace their passwords with their fingerprint to establish a secure connection to their sensitive information.
TrueMe is more of a service than an application. Once a fingerprint is assigned to an account, the vendor or financial institution is removed from the equation. TrueMe servers decrypt and process the information to authenticate the user and then send the okay to the Web site or service. Neither the operating system nor the Web site needs to know a password, a user ID, or a fingerprint pattern.
"This is something that's been a long time coming," said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc., an analyst firm. "The fingerprint readers and platform modules have been around for several years already but they're not being utilized very much except for authentification to the notebook. This takes it a step forward where people can do e-commerce with some degree of confidence that there is a secure transaction going on."
With this news, Pay By Touch has their work cut out for them selling the idea to banks and vendors. Kay estimates that it might take between three and five years to build out the entire ecosystem.
"It's still a behavior issue when you're talking about either in-store point-of-sale applications or at-home validate-yourself-to-your-bank-with-your-finger kind of thing, and it's not something that we've historically done as a culture," said Tom Elliott, vice president for North American Consulting Strategy Analytics. "People write down their passwords on yellow stickies and post it on their computers, so translating that behavior is a long, continuous pushing process."
Elliott said that he recently visited a store with a similar simplified payment system and saw zero promotional material advertising the system as an option.
"Is there any sign indicating that its there? No. They've installed it and it works but they're not pushing it," he said. "It's definitely something that somebody has to keep pushing, and that's always the problem with smaller companies with great ideas. I know that Pay By Touch has some serious backing but it's not like IBM had this great idea."
For TrueMe, Pay By Touch will have to convince consumers to purchase the $30 USB device or a laptop with a touchpad. The USB device can support up to five different users' fingerprints.
TrueMe was announced at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference. The system will now support AppExchange, Salesforce's contact management program. Siegal expects that the company will announce several more online applications and institutions that will sign on to use TrueMe throughout the end of the year.
For more information on TrueMe, visit www.trueme.com