No scanner needed for new Diamond Fortress Android fingerprint authentication app

Diamond Fortress Technologies has announced a new app that uses rear-facing cameras in Android devices to authenticate users by fingerprint.

Called ICE Unlock, the app creates a high-quality map of user fingerprints and currently works with more than 500 million Android devices on the market.

“Our mobile phones are the hub of our lives, so it’s more important than ever to keep all the personal and professional information stored on our devices as secure as possible,” Diamond Fortress Technologies CEO Charles Hatcher said. “Fingerprint scanners available on other mobile platforms are simply not as accurate as ICE Unlock.”

The app is currently available for free on the Google Play Store, and an ASK will soon be available for developers to purchase.

The app isn’t perfect yet, though. As Hatcher revealed in a report on The Blaze this week, the app could feasibly be fooled by a high-quality image of a fingerprint.  

“Presently no – the system can’t tell the difference,” Hatcher said. “Theoretically if you have a high enough resolution photo the system will read it as a fingerprint, but these are the improvements we want to make in the future.”

That being said, in the same Blaze report, Hatcher also said the ICE Unlock system is still more accurate than the Touch ID system on the iPhone 5S, which only captures about 20 percent of the biometric data the Diamond Fortress app does.

Reported previously in BiometricUpdate.com, last year, Diamond Fortress Technologies launched an Indiegogo campaign to find the development of two mobile wallet apps allowing consumers to secure online transactions with fingerprint biometrics captured from a smartphone camera.

Article Topics

Android  |  authentication  |  consumer  |  Diamond Fortress Technologies  |  fingerprint  |  smartphone