Concordium Foundation to collaborate with Hitachi on biometric electronic signatures

Swiss permissionless Layer 1 blockchain provider Concordium Foundation has announced a collaboration with Japanese IT company Hitachi on proof-of-technology for a Web3 wallet for Concordium blockchain that uses biometric electronic signatures. A release says the biometric wallet aims to improve convenience and reduce risks associated with the multi-word seed phrase typically used to recover lost wallets.

Concordium blockchain’s zero knowledge self-sovereign identity frameworks and their integration into mobile devices provides enhanced identification capabilities verified by a third party, revealing only necessary information from the user.

For instance, if you purchase a youth ticket at an event, you may be prompted to provide proof-of-age. “The checkout application will connect to Concordium’s wallet and may ask whether the user is above a certain age. The ID owners can then decide whether they want to share the information,” explains Concordium CTO Nibras Stiebar-Bang. “You don’t need to reveal your gender, nationality, age, social security number, or other sensitive data.”

Hitachi’s Public Biometric Infrastructure (PBI) platform combines biometric authentication with public key infrastructure digital signatures. Biometric information is not itself stored and therefore cannot be leaked.

The proof-of-technology explores the potential of generating a seed phrase upon wallet creation, triggered by a PBI. It would use a biometric electronic signature when restoring the wallet and would operate without the user storing the seed phrase anywhere, which eliminates having to memorize the seed phrase, or the risk of it being lost or stolen. This would improve user convenience and security, the partners say.

The research may be the next step in protecting digital wallets and improving large-scale crypto adoption.

“PBI is already used for user verification at bank transactions and cashless payments due to its high security and convenience,” says Dr. Kenta Takahashi, leading researcher at Hitachi. “We hope that secure and convenient self-sovereign identity, the foundation of trust within Web3, and management of crypto assets and NFTs can be realized based on the user’s biometric information by integrating PBI into Concordium’s wallet.”

Hitachi joined Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group’s decentralized identity and verifiable credential consortium along with a number of other companies in October.

Article Topics

biometric authentication  |  digital wallets  |  electronic-signature  |  Hitachi  |  PKI  |  self-sovereign identity  |  web3