Mofiria: Mobile security at your fingertips!

The folks at Sony have come up with an ingenious method of securing our mobile devices from theft or unauthorized use. They’re developing a new finger vein authentication technology, called mofiria, that could effectively lock up our laptops & cellphones and keep them safe from intruders… only to be unlocked by an near-infrared scan (via a CMOS sensor) of the veins in our finger!

This Mofiria technique uses a unique method where a CMOS sensor captures scattered light inside the finger veins. The vein pattern is extracted from the captured image and data from this pattern is compressed to store in the memory on a mobile device. The authentication accuracy is less than 0.1% for “False Rejection Rate”, and takes only about about 0.015 sec when using a personal computer CPU or about 0.25 sec with a cell phone CPU.

The Sony website says that, compared with other biometric authentication techniques, vein authentication technology is more accurate & harder to forge since (obviously) it uses veins which are inside the human body.

Look for this technology in commercial applications at some point this year.

Read more about mofiria here.