Hitachi’s Research & Development department is joining forces with Concordium Foundation, a blockchain developer, to pioneer a groundbreaking biometric crypto wallet. This innovative technology, announced on December 12, will enable users to generate seed words using only their fingerprints or facial scans, eliminating the need to remember or store these words. Instead, a second biometric scan will allow users to re-import their wallet’s accounts, according to Concordium representatives.
The Evolution of the Biometric Crypto Wallet
The biometric wallet is still in its infancy, with both teams referring to it as a ‘proof of technology’ rather than a fully developed wallet. Once completed, the wallet will incorporate Hitachi’s Public Biometric Infrastructure (PBI) and Concordium network’s self-sovereign identity framework to establish biometric-based accounts.
Concordium’s head of commercial, Torben Kaaber, and technical advisor, Torben Pryds Pederson, shared further insights into the project in a conversation with Cointelegraph. Pederson revealed that a biometric wallet could be particularly beneficial for the Concordium network, which requires users to undergo an ‘ID process’ to create an account. This process is designed to thwart harmful activities on the network, such as hacks and rug pulls, making it crucial to preserve user access to their IDs.
Unlocking the Future of Crypto Wallets
Users will have two options to unlock their wallets: either regenerate the seed words via a biometric scan or decrypt a copy of their seed words using a key derived from the scan. In either case, an attacker would typically be unable to access the user’s account without the user’s face or fingerprint. If a user loses their device, they can import their wallet onto a new device by performing the scan on the new device, eliminating the need to store seed words copies, as stated by Kaaber and Pederson.
Overcoming Challenges in Biometric Data
In a blog post published on March 25, 2022, Hitachi acknowledged that their team encountered several obstacles while developing the PBI. They noted that biometric data is ‘fuzzy,’ meaning two different scans of the same face or fingerprint will never yield identical data. To address this issue, the team employed ‘fuzzy key generation and special error correction technology’ to ‘extract feature vectors’ from scans. This approach enabled them to train the software to differentiate between scans of two different individuals and two separate scans of the same person.
Most crypto wallets necessitate users to store seed words as a backup in case their device fails. If they lose this backup, they usually lose access to their account and any funds within it. This has been acknowledged as a barrier potentially hindering the widespread adoption of crypto. The Hitachi and Concordium biometric wallet is one proposed solution to this issue, with MPC wallets and magic links being two other potential alternatives.
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