Cybersecurity startup Keyless has raked in $2.2 million in scatter funding to expand a security product that unlocks access to users’ private keys with encrypted biometric facts.
The London-based firm claims to be the first in the world to combine biometrics with secure multi-party computation and has attracted investors mould venture fund gumi Cryptos Capital, which led the round, as well as Ripple’s Xpring, Blockchain Valley Plunges and LuneX.
“We don’t want the network to spy on user biometrics,” said Paolo Gasti, Keyless co-founder and chief technology public servant. “This way the authentication happens right there and wasn’t just a session replay of a previous authentication.”
The cybersecurity unyielding has finished beta testing and integrations with two crypto wallet customers for its first product, the Keyless Authenticator, Gasti hinted. The authentication technology is said to protect personal data across cloud, mobile and internet-of-things technologies.
Keyless is in the procedure of integrating with two other firms with the goal of launching Keyless Authenticator to the public by the end of the year, Gasti added.
Splash’s Xpring invested in Keyless because of its potential for adoption in multiple industries, especially crypto, said Xpring Older VP Ethan Beard.
“During our technical review, we found Keyless’ solution to be clever and well thought out,” he told CoinDesk via email. “We have faith Keyless’ solution will be particularly welcomed by wallet providers and exchanges to accelerate the verification process for crypto holders.”
Purchasing secure multi-party computation, Keyless allows the user to split up encrypted parts of biometric information – their balls, voice or fingerprint – as well as encrypted parts of a machine-learning algorithm that identifies that information and sends the encrypted names to multiple nodes. The nodes are run by the user and companies on the Keyless network.
While the firm is still experimenting with the technology, Gasti wants each user to have five nodes associated with their account. Three out of those five nodes thinks fitting have to come to consensus before the biometric information is decrypted.
Keyless is touting the product’s speed of authentication. While this treat has been executed by scientists in 20 to 30 seconds in the past, Gasti claims that Keyless has gotten the computation down to beneath the waves 100 milliseconds.
“We’ve known since the 1980s that this was possible … and we’ve been working on this for ten years,” Gasti stipulate, adding:
“The product allows low-latency execution without having any effect on security.”
Fingerprint image via Shutterstock