QTECH-ID Technology
This page presents you with the different aspects of the QTECH-ID technology. By following the presentation link, you can view a shockwave movie, presenting the concept of the QTECH-ID technology. You will also find an index of html documents available from this page.
A finger is read in three dimensions by a video system, which produces a multitude of pixels. A special analog circuit chooses some of those pixels and retains only 8,000 of them to produce an abstract picture (similar to a Picasso painting).
Since a finger is never placed twice the same way on a reader, the picture is always different. Moreover, the physical contact to a life detector in the finger reader produces the synchronization point for the image, multiplying the differences in the image.
These 8,000 pixels are then sent to a computer, using the same frequencies that computers normally talk with.
Although a receiving computer interprets the pixels as bits, and shows a 1,000 byte string of characters, the computer is fooled since it is not computer generated code. You could put your finger on a QTECH-ID reader at every second for a year, and you would never get the same code twice, even for a lifetime since the QTECH-ID image represents information at 2 to the power of 7999.
Upon enrollment, a finger is read twice, 10% of the 8,000 bits are chosen to produce the authentication material. The 800 bits of authentication material comes from 8,000 video pixels, which makes this material absolutely safe for your privacy as well as for any computer system. The 8000 video bits are never kept anywhere, and cannot be reproduced by a computer.
You open an account in a bank and they give you a smart card that holds your 16 digit account number and your 100 bytes of authentication material. Both of these can be in the clear, meaning there is no need for encryption and shuffling which take too much place on a smart card.
These 100 bytes of authentication material are not computer generated code, and can only be related to the 1,000 produced by your finger and a QTECH-ID reader.
This smart card can hold money for your small expenses, which can be deducted directly from the card, or makes transactions from your bank account for larger expenses. Either debit or credit.
The smart card can also be used for medical services where a medical file can be opened either from the chip on the card, or from a medical server, only upon your finger match allowing authorization for reading that file or folder.
There is no limit to the amount of applications you could dream of.
One unfortunate consequence of the explosive growth in the number and variety of devices links to electronic networks like the Internet, the World Wide Web, intranets, extranets and so on, has been the development of fraud on an unprecedented scale. In terms of non-cash payment (essentially credit, debit and smart card) fraud, for example, the European Union estimates the size of the problem at $2,9 billion dollars per year worldwide, about 25% of which is absorbed by EU issuers.
Cellular telephone systems fraud by itself already exceeds one billion dollars annually, according to some sources. In the public sector, more than $10 billion is lost every year under entitlement programs in the United States alone. Moreover, electronic fraud threatens to get significantly worse as E-commerce spreads out, as projected, from being primarily a business-to-business activity currently to becoming more of a direct business-to-consumer mechanism in the years ahead.
The magnitude of this expected transformation in ways of doing business is staggering: in a 1998 research report the O.E.C.D. projected that E-commerce will soar from $26 billion currently to one trillion dollars in the next seven years. For this to happen tens of millions of people will have to come on line and the potential for system abuse of one kind or another will grow accordingly.
The problem of fraud and misrepresentation is just as prevalent, although more difficult to quantify, in the advantage being taken of outmoded or inadequate identification/authorization mechanisms that allow access to computer files, programs etc. or to physical locations of various kinds.
It extends even to such critical items as national social security cards the abuse of which results not only in fraud but in illegal immigration, job displacement etc., with all the expense and social disruption that this entails. The problem has reached such proportions in the United States that it has resulted in a bill now before Congress that requires the federal government to upgrade the Social Security card to the counterfeit-resistant level of a $100 Federal Reserve bank note by January 1, 2002 and to replace all cards by 2008.
Clearly, conventional methods by which access to databases and credit facilities is given and controlled - smart cards, magnetic stripe cards, PINs and passwords which can be altered, forgotten, lost or stolen - are no longer adequate to the task and must be replaced by better technologies. Even so-called public-key infrastructure (PKI), an increasingly popular, if expensive, system for digitally encrypting financial and other sensitive information, and controlling who sends and receives it, is subject to key management problems. Nevertheless, billions of dollars are being spent each year by US corporations in attempts to keep computers and computer networks safe - $6.3 billion in 1998, rising to $13 billion in 2000, in the estimation of Dataquest, a California-based market research firm.
Most experts agree that, ultimately, a total solution to the problem, if there is one, will only be found in the field of biometrics, which is the science of identifying an individual on the basis of who they are biologically or physiologically, a difference that is measurable electronically, albeit with significant, frequently unacceptable error rates. Biometrics is normally associated with fingerprinting, an historical police practice that has unsavory connotations for most people, but variations have developed that measure other anatomical features like the hand, the face or the iris of the eyes. These industry developments have been encouraged by the importance given to biometrics by the U.S. National Security Agency which in 1992 set up a working group known as the Biometric Consortium to promote the use and acceptance of biometric technology by federal agencies. Similar initiatives in the private sector have resulted in efforts by major U.S. industry players, like IBM, Compaq and Microsoft, to establish standards by which biometric technologies can be evaluated and compared. (All major computer manufacturers are believed to be at some stage of planning to incorporate a biometric reader device in their product lines; indeed, some such products are already on the market).
All of these technologies are inherently flawed, not only because of the questionable reliability of the digitization and pattern recognition processes they use, which show up in error rates, but because digital information, even if encrypted, can be hacked or other wise taken advantage of by unscrupulous operators. Of greater concern, however, are the right-to-privacy issues that biometric technologies raise. Fingerprinting, in particular, is regarded by many as being far too invasive: as an attempt to answer the question "Who am I?" with the kind of evidence a DNA sample can best provide when the operative question that really needs to be answered is "Am I who I say I am?" or "Am I who I represent myself to be?" In a free society the distinction is fundamental. As a consequence private lobby groups, with media support, have become increasingly vocal on these issues and have succeeded in getting provincial and state legislatures to introduce legal restrictions on the use and sharing or personal information obtained by fingerprinting and other invasive means. Even the White House has weighed in with a call for an electronic bill of rights.
QTech is proposing an elegant – as well as total – solution that is designed to be fully protective of individual rights and should meet all requirements of privacy groups, whose support is presently being sought. The technology rests on a new biological (not biometric) data set that is benign and yet far more robust and detailed that, say, fingerprint minutiae, although it is based on an image taken from a human finger. It rests also on a proprietary analog (video) image processing technique that is impossible to decrypt because it is not based on computer algorithms. QTech's "QTECH-ID" technology creates, through a computer server, a special bio-electronic signature, known as a "del-gram". This del-gram image is stored in a server or smart card, for authentication purposes. Even if the del-gram could be discovered at the server where it is recorded, as an abstract image it would represent useless information, unrecognizable as a fingerprint because it was not a fingerprint in the first place. In terms of reliability, the theoretical chances of any two people having the same QTECH-ID are 2 to the power of 7,998, or one in multiple billions. Moreover, the simple architecture of the QTECH-ID system points to easy operability online or offline and very low acquisition and operating costs.
