Sony offers vein identification for laptops

Forget passwords and fingerprints. Sony is taking laptop security to a new level with its new fingerprint veining system for laptops and mobile phones. The technology is not new — Hitachi has had such products available for a year now, but this is the first time a compact version has been made available for mobile phones and laptops. Called “mofiria,” it uses a CMOS sensor that digitally captures light inside the finger.

“The vein pattern is extracted from the captured finger vein image and data from the pattern is compressed into the size of one-tenth to store in memory,” said Sony in a statement.

Sony claims the false rejection rate is less than 0.1 percent and that the processing time is a mere 0.015 seconds for a laptop and 0.25 seconds for a mobile phone. However, the question of just how many people will use it remains. So far, most of us still rely on simple passwords.

Read: [Wired]