Mastercard patent filing proposes way to secure biometric template enrollment

When a person creates a fingerprint template by pressing their finger against a biometric scanner, the scanner is generally not capable of telling whether each scan is of the same finger of the same person. In unattended biometric enrollment situations, this creates a risk of fraud, with one of the people whose biometrics were combined with another’s posing as them for authentication, according to a new patent application from Mastercard.

The patent filing for “Systems and Methods for Preventing Biometric Infringement” has been published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

“Current biometric sensors and registration processes cannot determine whether a single user is performing a biometric registration process, or more than one user is performing the registration process,” the inventors write. “Consequently, two or more users can register their respective biometric feature (e.g., a fingerprint) on a single device during a single registration process. As such, any user that participated in the registration process may be subsequently authenticated by the single stored biometric template or profile. This enables any one of the registered users to perform a fraudulent activity by purporting to be any one of the other registered users.”

To address this problem, Mastercard researchers propose extracting two or more elements of the biometric feature from the initial scan, and then validating the template against the next scan. Extracted biometric features (like minutia in the case of fingerprints) are “characterized by type, location, and orientation relative to the coordinate system of the biometric sensor.”

The method can be applied to any biometric modality, according to the application.

Mastercard has been investing in several different modalities for retail payment, including pilot of its Biometric Checkout Program with iris and face biometrics from PayEye, and palm biometrics in partnership with Ingenico, Fulcrum Biometrics, Fujitsu Frontech and Scanntech. The company remains active in payment cards, however, with a drumbeat of approvals for its fingerprint-enabled Mastercard.

Article Topics

biometric enrollment  |  biometric template  |  biometric template protection  |  biometrics  |  fraud prevention  |  Mastercard  |  patents