The third week of April saw the new Samsung Galaxy S5 getting the same sort of reception that its rival smartphone, the iPhone 5S, received immediately after its release. The global hacking community sees the constant claims of biometric superiority as a challenge, so it makes sense that on the release of a commercial fingerprint sensor phone videos start to surface with the new device being broken into.
Fortunately, there is a lot to learn from the public security breach which in addition to not being too big a deal in terms of end user compromise serves as an excellent educational opportunity.
The Galaxy S5 isn’t the only flagship smartphone launching with fingerprint biometrics in 2014. In late December Fingerprint Cards AB (FPC) announced that its new FPC1020 capacitive touch sensor will be featured on the flagship phone of a global tier one OEM expected to be released this summer.
This past week FPC received the first order of the sensors for the upcoming device, and it’s a big one. The initial order added up to SEK 4 million, and before the year’s end, the sensor company expects to ship more than 3 million units for the new mobile device before year’s end.
It wasn’t all fingerprints and smartphones this week in mobile ID. The FIDO Alliance announced a new sponsor member of its strong online authentication consortium: Morpho (Safran). As a member of FIDO, Morpho will be lending its technology for the purpose of developing specifications for next generation authentication.
Morpho will contribute to FIDO’s vision of more secure and convenient online authentication for a broad range of identity and payment applications,” said FIDO president Michael Barrett. “We are delighted to welcome Morpho as a Sponsor member and look forward to drawing upon their expertise in biometrics and protecting identity data.”
Meanwhile at findBIOMETRICS, the third week of physical access control month has come to a close. Be sure to visit and take a look at the investigation of four real biometric security deployments that show diversity in that area of application.
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