Enabling secure biometric authentication

29th September 2021

Fingerprints

Joe Bush

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Biometrics company Fingerprint Cards AB (Fingerprints) has enabled biometric authentication to be executed entirely within Infineon’s Secure Element, making it cheaper and easier for card manufacturers to develop and roll out biometric payment cards at scale. While many industry experts believed this to be a milestone out of reach, this technological leap has been achieved while maintaining biometric performance and increasing security.

Fingerprints collaborated with Infineon Technologies, a specialist in security controllers for contactless payments, to demonstrate the capabilities of the new software. The partners combined Infineon’s 40nm security controller (SLC38) with Fingerprints’ T-Shape 2 (T2) sensor module and the latest biometric software for payments. This is particularly significant as almost one in two payment cards with a chip worldwide has an Infineon security controller at its core.

To achieve this, Fingerprints’ R&D team focused on reducing the memory footprint, flash and RAM requirements of its software to fit inside Infineon’s SLC38 Secure Element. All while maintaining transaction times and biometric performance.

“We like a challenge and are always looking to optimise our technology. When we proposed this disruptive solution, and the industry said it could not be done, we got to work,” commented Michel Roig, SVP Business Line Payments & Access at Fingerprints. “After months of development and drawing on years of experience and collaboration with Infineon, we have achieved this world first. But this is what we do. Our technology started in smartphones, we refined it for payment cards and now we have taken a big step further. Overall, though, this brings more options to our card manufacturing partners. Each roll-out is different, so now they can choose what alternative to deploy to bring fast, frictionless and hygienic in-store payments to even more consumers.”

“Multi-interface security controller SLC38BML with best-in-class RF performance and computation power allows a full on card fingerprint authentication in combination with Fingerprints’ sensor without integration of an extra microcontroller. This substantially reduces system development and manufacturing complexity alongside lowering material costs for biometric smart cards,” added Tolgahan Yildiz, VP & Head of Product Line Payment and Ticketing Solutions at Infineon. “In collaboration with Fingerprints, we are working to enable high performance payment solutions with biometric smart cards that are easy to integrate and scalable.”