Yeah. Yeah. Hey, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. If you're involved in national security,
if you're in that space, then you don't want to miss this. We're going to be discussing
biometrics on your computer, what the what the problems are, and what the solutions that are
now available. So get ready to take a bunch of notes and strap in.
This is EOD Gear Improvised. EOD Gear Improvised. Can we get the most of up yet? Stand by.
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EOD-gear.com. Initial success or total failure. EOD Gear Improvised. With your host,
former Navy EOD Tech and owner of EOD Gear. Steve Cassidy.
All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for tuning in. Very excited today. We have a little
ritz fall on the line today. He is the senior VP of sales and marketing for next biometrics
who are publicly traded in Europe, and they are also a partner of ours, EOD Gear.
So, all thank you for joining in. I know we have a lot of people who are listening in.
They are involved in national security, and we have all of these requirements to log in and
use passwords and biometrics, and maybe the biometrics are good enough. Maybe they're not.
We'll thank you for joining us. Thank you, Steve. Thank you. Yeah, we have a lot of
security matters that matters to us and matters to your own
perfection of that data. I mean, we have people tend to have more and more passwords,
more and more hassles to remember the passwords, and we have more and more accounts that are stored
somewhere in the cloud. And I believe biometrics could actually help you in this case, and I think
people are getting more and more familiar with biometrics. When it comes to, if you look at the
laptop, the modern laptop today, you most likely have a fingerprint biometric reader inside that.
If you don't, there's solutions that you can actually attach a fingerprint sensor to that with
via the USB cables. That's something that we provide, but you also today are quite familiar with
with the smartphones where you have either you have a facial recognition, you have fingerprint
sensors, and you have voice recognition, for example, in your smartphone. All that is actually
biometrics inside the today life. And how about the security on those? You don't think about that
too much, actually. So maybe actually, yeah, good. Yeah. So I saw an article that actually came out
this morning. They were using voice recognition for access to the hardware, but they were saying that
they are now able, I guess, use artificial intelligence to be able to defeat it within six tries.
And so now you have to go, well, okay, there's voice. And then facial, you know, facial recognition
is very tough because it can be hacked as well. And so, you know, now we have fingerprint.
And of course, everybody's like, oh, you know, I like the old movies where they're lifting the
fingerprints off of the champagne glass. And they use that then to gain access. And so, you know,
I know with next biometrics in your fingerprint reader, we now have the upgraded fingerprint
reader. So if this is something, even if you have an existing laptop with a fingerprint reader,
you could still add this, which would provide the thermal, which is kind of like a second look.
Yeah. So you can, you can add your active thermal, which then actually remove a lot of
spoofing attempts. And here, I think if you look at the sensor itself, a fingerprint sensor,
I mean, the larger sensor you get, I mean, maybe if you're an international traveler and if you
going to the US, you actually need to present four fingers. So four times one finger on a large
large area fingerprint sensor. I mean, the more the larger you get, the higher the security
in that perspective. So of course, if you have a small sensor in your power button, in your laptop,
you may actually want to increase your security with actually adding the external sensor that
will help you. So your larger your larger footprint gives access to more data points to increase
the level of security. Correct. Correct. So you have something in the in the finger called
minutia points. It's very old. I think it was in the 17th century. The first one was actually
convicted by a fingerprint on the crime scene. So it's a very old history. Since then,
you've been measuring the magnitude points in crime scene. And that is what's used in today's
technology as well. So when you capture a fingerprint, you actually compare it to what you have in
your database. When you enroll your finger fingerprints from the beginning. And that comparison is
done by having measuring these minutia points, which is represented of the fingerprints. So
if you have a match, then you have maybe you read out 30 of them from a sensor. And if you
matching 20 out of them, 28 out of them, you have a match. Then you know it's you that
actually trying to log in. But if the physical size is limited, and you have a power button type
of the sensor, maybe you will have one minutia point or two. Then it's kind of hard to compare.
So size definitely matters in comes to security. Gotcha. Gotcha. So coming back to next
biometric specifically. You have the larger you have the larger sensors. You also have the active
thermal. So which acts kind of the second look. For our folks out there that are OEMs, you know,
maybe they want to create their own system. So we have people that build their own custom laptops
or, you know, maybe it's a small producer for very specific agencies. And they're looking for
that kind of solution is so are the OEMs or you know, because they're already years are already used
in. I believe the Toshiba Dell. Yeah, we have a few, we have a few different areas. Actually,
we're focusing on four different market segments. And public security is one like the the
the use case with with a border control for example, or if you enroll people like India,
they have enrolled quite a few people in the in the system for for financial inclusion.
We also have active control where you actually have enter premises or access control when
when it comes to these kind of things. Then we have obviously notebooks that laptops
especially and also some tablets actually on the field in in in a border control for example,
you may have a tablet for example. And then we have FinTech and payments of FinTech, which is more
we have an example of a crypto wallet that you actually a cold wallet that you can't really
cannot access with a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, but you actually need to have the whole device in your
hand and you need to enter the crypto coins with with the paper. So that's that's a that's a huge
deal for everybody who's trading crypto because they have their their wallets that are completely
offline. And yeah, that's a big deal. Very good. Yeah, I think yeah, I think 20% of the
or I don't know the numbers is the whole bunch of crypto coins that are actually lost because
the password is lost. And you can't retrieve it, you don't have the password. So yeah, it's a big
big deal. So that's a nice nice way of protecting your data without actually remembering reading
the password in this case. So going to requirements, so covering you know medical data,
financial data and security data, national security data, you know, that brings up NIST.
And then you have an FBI certification as that's part of the standard. Can you go into that
just a little bit? Yeah, so so the FBI puts up a few requirements on on that. I mean, again,
if I compared to the more convenient sensor that are in the mobile phone, for example, they would
not not never be able to get the FBI certification because there's a certain level of security you
need to be fulfilling. And that's the minutia point that we are discussing. You need to have
certain set of the minutia points we have to have an FBI certified sensor. And that's what we have
in our past 20, which we are today telling. Now for the Fab 20, you're now is that in both
the sensors that is the USB plug-in. So if if I have a laptop, maybe my fingerprint reader broke
or maybe I just need something that's a little bit more robust. But then you have the OEM side
where you're like, hey, I'm just I'm going to manufacture my own components that require a
fingerprint sensor. So does that for both units? So you could get that same level of encryption
for a plug-in as well as if I'm manufacturing devices that require a fingerprint reader.
Exactly, exactly. So if you look at the for example, the left of manufacturers,
they actually use a so FBI version. So a UR version, forking UR version of the same sensor
as the USB that you connect to the PC. This one is integrated into and embedded into the
design of yours. So I think the manufacturer stands in front of a series of problems or
that we can solve. I mean, it's industrial design, it's user behavior, it's durability,
it's security. And of course, I mean, when you when you investigate adding a sensor to your device,
of course, the price is something that you want to want to be looking at as well.
So I think today, I mean, ID in consumer electronics, more or less as we have discussed, the smaller,
you actually want to hide the sensor as much as possible. And you don't want it to be so much
a part of your ID. Whereas in the B2B area, you want to have the security. Then it's actually fine
to have it as a large, larger sensor that is on in your laptop. And then of course,
it's not as hidden as it is in the consumer electronics, but it's again security matters.
Well, I think it's that final line of, you know, most people are convenience driven, not security
driven. So I think and that's and that's the whole part of this is, you know, if you're in a security
space, you know, whether it's national security, defense, you know, financial, hip medical,
that whole place where you need that, then that's where you have to start looking at
higher quality. And of course, you know, that that comes with a whole different cost.
Now if somebody were to build their own devices and they want to use your sensors, how does
the software work with that? Is there a base software that's already embedded in that or
is everybody writing their own code to incorporate it?
Now, so we have the pre-integrated software only of already. So yeah, we have the, of course,
you have the enrollment and maximum algorithm that's the part of the complete solution and the
SDK that that comes with it with the fingerprint. So there's the SDK. It's most likely ported to
the MCU CPU you actually choose. So there's a few different vendors out there. I mean, there's the
NXT and so on. So you select your MCU with high enough capabilities to actually enroll and
to read out and to store the template, which is actually done there. We port it's not only done,
they already done. I mean, the SDK is ported towards that MCU. So it's already pre-integrated,
so it's up and running. Of course, there's a few APIs that you do anyway need to connect to
in the host system to get available in your own OS format, in your own ID, in your own
menu, so whatever you want to kind of application you want to do. But pre-integrated already on a high
level. So because you can integrate it via the APIs, if you also want to do it and incorporate
facial recognition or voice, you know, whatever systems you're doing, so you could create a
two-look, three-look security platform. That's all possible using the next biometrics,
fat 20. Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. So you can share, share many of the different APIs when
you actually have that. I mean, enrollment scenario would probably be similar if you enroll your
face or you enroll your fingerprint sensor. So yes, you can share a lot of things. Well, that's
fantastic. So what have you guys got going looking forward? Is there anything that you have coming
out that is that you can talk about? I know you're a publicly traded company, but you know,
you do hold stuff close. Maybe you have some travels. Yeah. What have you got? What do you see going
on in the future? So I see it's exactly the problem area that we are describing here. I mean,
you have an idea. You have a thought about a OEM device. You want to produce.
But you don't know how. And maybe you don't have the software or engineering resources.
This is what we are trying to fill the gap between the SDK and upwards. So actually,
it will become even more complete offering. So actual integration will be quicker. Your time
to market will be quicker. That's one part that we are looking at expanding. Also, if you look
at bi-metric in its whole, in its general, I mean, you need more security in anywhere. And you want
you want to be not able to read out the template or you want to store it as locally as possible.
And we are working on adding that onto the exact same shape, actually. So it's impossible to
read out the template. Today, it's in the MCU. It's encrypted. But still, you should be able to,
I mean, if you're happier, you can most likely read it out from the system. But with a
mattress ship, which is the trend for in laptops and others, it gets it more tricky to read out.
Okay. Well, so people may be listening to this. They're very interested. We can send them to
nextbiometrics.com. And you can reach out to people there. Is there a better way to reach you?
I know we have Matt here in the United States. Next biometric products are also available from
EOD Gear on GSA Schedule. So if that falls within your realm, more than happy to discuss that. But
you know, all the technical questions, do we have a place you want people to reach out to
on the website or email? Yeah, there's two ways that I got posted the same email address. So the
email address is saved at nextbiometrics.com. There's a forum on the website as well where you can
feel out for the state or the technical question. Then you will get to the right person. And Matt,
in the US, of course, he would take care of America. And I mean, we're a global company. So we have
a presence in Asia, India, and Dubai, Japan. So we will definitely be here for the customers and
for the questions that are advised. So I met Matt in person at ISC. I think it's ISC West out in
Las Vegas earlier this year. Do you have any other events that you'll be attending in the US or
Europe, Asia and Middle East? I mean, yes. I mean, one of the, of course, it's the
US humor and it's going to show in Las Vegas this year. I mean, there will be fine clients,
but also end users, actually. We did the trend, of course, with all the different security aspects.
But we also are in the traffic domain. I mean, there's a traffic event in France, normally in
November, where we normally are present. Where you have all the governmental and border control
security parts available. That's where we normally don't meet our clients. Will that be in Paris?
It used to be in Paris. I think this year is actually in South France this year. It's been
interesting. I'll be over there. So we're attending the NATO EOD summit and brought us lava,
but I'm catching Paris on the way back. So always interested to see what's going on in Paris.
So I don't mind the South of France. I had to work there with the French clearance divers.
That was the struggle was real. Well, that's fantastic. Well, I mean, is there anything else that you
would like to put out to everybody? It's really fascinating. I've always been a fan of security.
I've kind of been involved in it since 1984. I am that old. But I mean, last words from you, Ulf,
on what's going on with you in next biometrics? No, I think we're on a journey as well. I mean,
I joined the next biometrics one a half years ago from another biometric company. I'm here to
scale the company and now we see the traction of that. And we do that because we have an active
thermal technology. We have the ultra-slame form factor which makes the ID design a lot better
compared to a competition. The user behavior is easier because you have one time to enroll,
for example, because of the size. And of course, the security level, which is where I'm coming from,
is the most matters for us. I mean, we are breeding security day out, day in, so I think that's
the three words I want to say to the last question. Okay. Well, fantastic. We'll go ahead and
cut this off. But hey, thank you so much. I look forward to hopefully catching you in somewhere
in Europe, either the end of this year or possibly next year, but I really do appreciate it.
Thank you very much, Steve. You have been listening to EOD Gear Improvised. EOD Gear Improvised.
Steve Cassidy, a former Navy EOD tech and owner, owner of EOD Gear initial success or total failure.
Two locations. One in Franklin and one in Huntsville. The website is EOD-gear.com. Find us on
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter. EOD Gear has customers from around the globe
until next time. This is EOD Gear Improvised. signing off.