A Swedish company called Quixter has brought the world's first a vein scanning payment technology to the marketplace. It is being used by some shops around Lund University. In Quixter's system, a person with an account walks to the point of sale, enters the last four digits of their phone number and then scans their palm. No money changes hands. There is no plastic card, cell phone or other device. You are simply buying with your biometrics.
Experts love vein scanning. They see in it an almost perfect biometric identity verification method. Fingerprints are easy to hack. facial recognition is unreliable. Iris scanning makes people nervous. They may tell you that it can't be hacked, but the vein pattern is still converted to a number for use by the electronic equipment. And when it becomes a number, it can still be hacked.
Secure Mobile Payments Are Best Done In Blood
In our relentless quest for
convenience, digital wallets started to give way to biometric
payments before they even really took hold. And already the
fingerprint ID, still a novelty feature in smartphone authentication,
is being pushed aside in favor of a biometric marker experts say is
more secure, accurate, and convenient: your veins. Your body's the
new wallet, and your blood is the new credit card number.
Veins are the rising star of biometric
payments, as we were reminded this week after a Swedish startup
debuted its vein-scanning payment technology, Quixter, one of the
first to be commercially adopted. If you're not familiar with
vein-scanning, how it works is simple: You hover your palm in front
of an infrared light scanner and the system recognizes the unique
pattern of your veins to identify you.
It's the same concept of other
biometric authentication options like the fingerprint scan, iris
scan, or facial recognition tech, but veins are like the Goldilocks
of biomarkers. Every person's vein pattern is totally unique, even in
identical twins; the pattern doesn't change as the body ages; and you
can't actually see most people's veins so they're extremely hard to
counterfeit—but they're still possible to scan without any physical
contact, making them extra convenient.
Fingerprints had a good run, until it
became clear that a greasy thumb smudge and a bit of silly putty was
all a hacker needed to steal someone's identity. And consumers tend
to find the idea of staring into a camera while a laser scans their
eyeballs overly intrusive. So security experts are pretty excited
about vein-scanning, or "hand vascular pattern identification,"
to use the technical term. The technology has been around for over a
decade, used for forensics, authentication in some hospitals,
schools, and ATMs in some countries, namely in Asia. But it's been
very slow to take off commercially.
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