Hitachi Research & Development has teamed up with the Concordium Foundation, a blockchain developer, to create a "proof of technology" for a biometric crypto wallet, as announced on December 12.
This upcoming wallet will enable users to generate a set of seed words solely using a fingerprint or facial scan, eliminating the need to store or remember these seed words. Representatives from Concordium informed that users will have the ability to re-import wallet accounts with a second biometric scan.
Currently in its early developmental stages, the wallet is being referred to as a "proof of technology," signifying that it's not yet a fully operational wallet. Upon completion, it will harness Hitachi’s Public Biometric Infrastructure (PBI) alongside Concordium Network’s self-sovereign identity framework to establish biometric-based accounts.
Torben Kaaber, Concordium's commercial director, and Torben Pryds Pederson, technical advisor, provided further insights into the project. Pederson emphasized the utility of biometric wallets for Concordium's network, where an "ID process" precedes account creation to safeguard against malicious activities like hacking. He highlighted the importance of retaining users' access to their IDs compared to other networks. However, Pederson noted that biometric wallets could theoretically be applied to any prospective blockchain, not limited to Concordium.
The biometrically secured wallet can be unlocked by regenerating the seed word through a biometric scan or decrypting a copy of the seed word via a key derived from the scan. Typically, without obtaining a user's face or fingerprints, an attacker cannot access their account. In the event of a lost device, users can import the wallet to a new device by scanning it, obviating the need to store copies of seed words, according to Kaaber and Pederson.
In a blog post from March 25, 2022, Hitachi outlined challenges faced while developing PBI. The company highlighted the inherent obscurity of biometric data, as different scans of the same person would never yield exactly identical data. Hitachi addressed this challenge by employing "fuzzy key generation and special error correction techniques" to extract feature vectors from scans, facilitating the software to differentiate between scans of distinct individuals and unique scans of the same person.
Traditional crypto wallets necessitate users to safeguard the seed word as a backup in case of device failure, leading to potential loss of access to their account and funds. Hitachi and Concordium's biometric wallets represent a proposition to address this issue, while alternative options such as multi-party computing wallets and magic links exist as potential solutions as well.
