Seventh Sense biometrics, PKI-based chat privacy protections granted US patent

A new patent granted to Seventh Sense AI by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) protects the company’s technology for binding face biometrics in a privacy-preserving way without storing a facial image, template or private keys in chat and messaging applications.

Seventh Sense Co-founders Varun Chatterji and Ashish Kushwaha are named on the patent document as inventors of the “Systems and Methods for Decentralized Recoverable Storage of Private Data and Anonymized, Confidential, Message Exchange Secured by User Biometrics.”

The system encrypts messages with a face-derived public key based on the receiving user’s face biometrics, and signs them with a face-derived private key based on the sending user’s face biometrics. The signature is verified with the sending party’s face biometrics and decrypted with the receiving party’s face biometrics.

Cryptographic tokens derived from the user’s face can also be applied to deepfake detection, by combining the facial image with challenge data. The authentication process can be also used for account recovery that avoids mechanisms that can be intercepted, like email resets or SMS messages, or spoofed, as in SIM swaps and social engineering attacks, according to the patent document.

The same technology can also be applied to document signing, digital identity and access management and step-up authentication use cases in banking, financial services and insurance, Chatterji says in a LinkedIn post.

Chatterji notes in the post that the technology allows private sector organizations to implement face biometrics logins similar to those of SingPass. In an email to Biometric Update, he explained the concept as similar to OpenPGP, but with keys derived from face biometrics.

Article Topics

biometric binding  |  data privacy  |  face biometrics  |  patents  |  PKI  |  public key cryptography  |  research and development  |  Seventh Sense