Fingerprint scanners have made life a little bit easier for smartphone users. Premium smartphone makers like Apple and Samsung use them to cut down the time of having to enter your pin every time you want to unlock your phone. But these scanners can be fooled relatively easy using a printer, wood glue and a transparent piece of paper.
San Diego chipmaker Qualcomm is releasing fingerprint scanning technology called Sense ID that creates a 3D model of your fingerprint using ultrasonic sound waves. By creating a 3D model using sound waves, the scan can gather extremely detailed data about every ridge and pore that's unique to your finger. That supposedly will make it much more difficult to spoof and make the scans a lot more reliable for authenticating identity. The current fingerprint scanner in your iPhone uses an capacitive sensing technology to take a 2D scan of your finger.
And because it uses sound waves to create a model of your finger, it can scan through material like glass, aluminum, steel or plastic. That would allow smartphone makers to not have to cut out a hole or put in a separate pad for the optical sensor. Instead, they could put it under the glass on the front of the phone or under whatever material that's on the back.
"We're taking fingerprint scanning technology to the next level," said Tim McDonough, vice president of product marketing at Qualcomm, in a phone call. "The 2D scanner is being used as a password replacement because it's convenient."
The new technology will only be available to phone makers as an addition to Qualcomm's Snapdragon mobile processor, so you likely won't ever find it in, for example, future iPhones because Apple prefers to use its own processors. (And besides, Apple already makes all of its own fingerprint scanning technology based off its acquisition of AuthenTec in 2012.) You might not even find it in future Samsung phones, as the Korean electronics giant abandoned the Snapdragon processor for its Galaxy S6 phone in favor of internally developed Exynos processor.
The Snapdragon processor is responsible for receiving the 3D scan of your fingerprint, where it is matched with a secure image of your fingerprint stored in a subsystem that's separate from the operating system. The 3D scan data never leaves the device. Qualcomm uses the authentication framework from the FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance for authenticating without a password. Being compliant with FIDO will let developers use the biometric authentication for accessing different third-part services, such as health records or banking.
The sound wave scanning technology is based on work from Ultra-Scan Corporation, which was acquired by Qualcomm in 2013. The Buffalo, New York-based company was founded in 1989 and first developed its ultrasound scans for fingerprint scanning at government agencies. Ultra-Scan worked with the Department of Defense to create the first non-optical four finger scanner.
This article has been updated to clarify that Apple's Touch ID scanner uses capacitive sensing technology. A previous version lumped smartphone fingerprint scanners in with optical fingerprint scanners.
