News from The Globe and Mail
Ready, aim... fingerprint
by John Lorinc - Friday, May 26, 2000
Security, like accounting, is one of those no-news-is-good-news businesses. So it seems appropriate that Dennis Hollingshead, co-founder and chairman of Mytec Technologies Inc., is a man who radiates nothing in particular: He's an ordinary-looking, low-key guy with an ordinary office in an ordinary suburban building. No glamour, no attitude, no news. Except this: His firm, which plows the proceeds from its alarm monitoring operation into the development of a high-end fingerprint scanning technology, recently scored a deal that turned every head in the watchful world of Canadian security.
In January, Smith & Wesson Corp., the storied Massachusetts gun maker, announced it will be working with Toronto-based Mytec to develop an electronic "smart" gun with a trigger-lock mechanism controlled by a fingerprint scanner in the handle. If you don't own the finger that bears the print encoded on the gun's scanning device, you'll effectively end up squeezing blanks. The arrangement--Mytec is one of four firms vying for S&W's favour--was part of a detente between S&W and U.S. governments: President Bill Clinton, facing outrage over gun-related deaths of children, brokered a deal to drop multibillion-dollar liability lawsuits against S&W if the company presses ahead with developing cyber-locks. Up in Canada, the announcement sent Mytec's moribund stock through the roof: It climbed from $2.89 to $11.60 between the beginning of February and the end of March. (The company lost $4.1 million on sales of $14 million in 1999.) The news also positioned Hollingshead--an electrical engineer and former Chubb Security Systems executive regarded as the paterfamilias of Canadian high-tech security--as a poster boy for gun safety.
There's something both counterintuitive and intuitive about Mytec's foray into the rat's nest of the American's gun-control politics. Canada doesn't really have a weapons industry, so what would we know about trigger locks? On the other hand, we do like gun control, so there's a certain socio-political tidiness to the fact that a Canadian firm ended up with such a gig. "I'm not a gun person," Hollingshead admits. "I happen to think it's a good idea to restrict the operation of a weapon like that."
Fingerprint scanning is part of a discipline known as "biometrics." The term originally applied to statistical study of biological phenomena, but in the security business it has become a handle for technologies that recognize unique human traits--be they one's voice, face, handprint, fingerprints or the iris portion of the eye. The field's origin is in policing, although the first commercial use was at a Wall Street investment firm in the mid-1970s. Today, the biometrics industry, estimated to be worth about $500 million (U.S.) a year, has grown beyond the cop market, as thousands of organizations install scanners to secure research labs, vaults, computer rooms--even daycare centres.
Not surprisingly, the industry is hustling to cash in on the security problems--real and perceived--associated with electronic communications. There's a push to replace complicated passwords with fingerprint scanners on PCs and laptops, hooking these devices to network security systems. Public agencies, meanwhile, see in scanning the potential for reining in health-care or welfare fraud. Mytec, which last year began marketing its debut line of scanners--in the development pipeline since the mid-1990s--is also experimenting with devices that can be installed on mobile phones, car locks and bank machines.
The Smith & Wesson prospect arose last year, after a senior Mytec engineer came across an article about how S&W was working on a smart gun. He contacted the company to see if it had tried fingerprint scanners. S&W said it had tested such devices in the past, but found them unreliable. Mytec, however, touted its system as foolproof and more sophisticated. "Within a week, they'd tested our unit and wanted a meeting," Hollingshead says.
Mytec's technology is indeed more complex than off-the-shelf biometric scanners. Typically, these devices map "minutiae"--ridges in a fingerprint, for instance--and compare them to an electronic version of the print, a process that can be cumbersome because of the size of the file required to store one print, let alone hundreds or thousands. Such scanners also have trouble with "difficult" prints--the ones that belong to people whose skin is very dry or smooth. Mytec's scanners, by contrast, record much more information about the print, then encrypt the data. On one product that Mytec has in development, the scrambled data is stored on a smart card--a quarter-sized disk attached to a key fob. To get through a secured door, the user swipes the card over the wall-mounted unit, thus downloading the data from the card into the scanner. Then the person puts his or her finger over a small window on the scanner and the device goes to work figuring out if there's a match. The door only opens for the owner of the card. "We never store a fingerprint," says Hollingshead.
Gun-mounted fingerprint scanners are trickier. As S&W spokesperson Ken Jorgensen explains, the trigger scanner has to survive heat, gun-cleaning solvents and the kickback from each shot. S&W will be testing Mytec's reader--whose processing components are located in a gun's handle--on some 25 handguns this summer. If the trials are successful, Mytec will license the technology to S&W. Jorgensen says the choice between Mytec and the three other contenders "will come down to who can produce a product that's affordable and can stand up to the rigours."
While there's nothing definite about his firm's alliance with S&W, Hollingshead will at least reap some positive publicity--not a bad thing in an increasingly competitive field dominated by American companies with much deeper pockets than his own. Its gun-control technology may make Mytec itself into a tempting target.
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