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PAY your credit card bills the SECURE way with your voiceprint ,
:: 21 July, 2007
A British company claims to have developed a technology that uses a person’s voiceprint as a way to secure credit card payments.
Each person has a unique voiceprint, and the company believes the same, rather than the credit card number, can be used while shopping and making payments.
Its inventors say the technology could help reduce identity theft and allow account holders to shop by mobile phone, even when they`re nowhere near an Internet connection.
"It`s a way of making payments for anything, anywhere with complete security and no concern. As long as they have a telephone they can do a transaction with Voice Pay," said Nick Ogden, founder and CEO of Voice Pay.
At the heart of Voice Pay is a speech authentication algorithm developed by Dublin-based Voice Vault.
Ogden said though on the surface, the system might seem a little like those voice dialling systems that exist on mobile phones, but it is much more sophisticated.
It analyzes 117 voice parameters that are wholly unique to an individual`s vocal chords and the shape of the inside of the mouth and nasal cavity. Even a voice impersonator, who might sound like the user, cannot mimic certain subtleties naturally present in a person`s voice, he said.
To use the voice payment system, a user has to first set up an account with Voice Pay, which can be done by calling the company from a cell phone and choosing a username and password, besides providing details of the credit card.
Next, the shopper provides a voiceprint by repeating a series of randomly generated numbers. Authentication would take place at the time of purchase.
A website having a Voice Pay icon will launch the site, which once the shopper had logged in, would call the customer’s cell phone. A computerized attendant would then ask the shopper to repeat numbers and then compare the person`s speech to the voiceprint saved. If it matches, the credit card will be billed. But if it doesn`t match, no purchase will be registered.
According to Ogden, a person could also potentially buy items over the phone, without the Internet.
Retail items in a store or in a catalog would have a Voice Pay product number as well as a phone number listed that the customer could call. The shopper would enter the product number and go through the process of repeating numbers randomly generated by the computerized attendant.
However, Andreas Stolcke, a senior research engineer at SRI in Menlo Park, CA, who specializes in speech and speaker recognition, said the way sound is produced in a person`s vocal chords, and then manipulated by the mouth and tongue, is difficult to model.
Other variables including the recording channel and background noise add to the difficulty of analyzing the sound and then matching it later. "I would not rely on it exclusively," he said.
"It`s a little like predicting the weather. You can measure the state of the weather at a particular instant and create a model of how it develops from one day to the next, but it`s an imprecise model, and you can`t always predict what will happen the next day,” Discovery News quoted him as saying.
But Ogden is not as skeptical. Voice Pay`s website launched on April 30, 2007 and to date has more than 200,000 people signed up to the use the system once it`s adopted by banks. Ogden further said he`s already in discussion with 52 banks around the world.
INSIDE News
Prevailing security methods used to protect against identity theft are losing ground to fraudsters. In fact, the total cost of identity fraud in the United States in 2006 reached $56.6 billion, up 6.4percent from $53.2 billion three years earlier, according to the 2006 Identity Fraud Survey Report from Javelin Strategy and the Better Business Bureau. What’s more, mean resolution time for these cases has risen to 40 hours and costs $6,383 per person, up from 33 hours and $5,249 per person three years ago, according to the same report.
The overwhelming damage to organizations forced the government to step in. New laws designed to protect people from identify theft, such as the Bank Secrecy Act, are requiring higher levels of user authentication for financial transactions.
“PINS and passwords are a joke, and they are where a lot of identity theft is coming from,” says Judith Markowitz, president and founder of J. Markowitz Consultants, a Chicago-based consultancy specializing in speech and biometrics. “It has stimulated interest in speaker verification and biometrics, especially in the financial services industry.”
Rather than requiring someone to answer challenging questions, voice biometrics can authenticate and verify a person’s identity by analyzing voice patterns and recognizing voiceprints, all within seconds. Voice biometrics, including speaker recognition, identification, and verification technologies, can be used to find out if a caller is who he claims to be. The sound of a person’s voice is represented as a sequence of mathematical values. Algorithms are written that process information and return results within a few seconds.
CellMaxSystems in Israel uses a voice verification algorithm to register and authenticate secure voice-based transactions over telecommunications networks. “The good thing about voice biometrics is that all you need is a phone or a computer with a microphone,” says Israel Ronn, CEO of CellMax Systems. “We are a software-only company.”
CellMax’s system includes a voice registration unit for providing unique initial identification by finding the user’s voice parameters in a voice registration sample and storing them in a large database.
The company is finding opportunities deploying its software in the call centers of financial institutions. Call center providers are interested not only in the security aspects of voice biometrics, but also in saving money by reducing the password reset process from between 20 and40 seconds to just a few seconds. “A few seconds extra spent per caller might come to $10,000 or $100,000 simply being spent on authentication,” Ronn says. “It also reduces wait times, which adds to your return on investment. Time is money, especially in the call center environment.”
New York-based T3 Telecom Software, a unified messaging vendor, offers a messaging system as part of its T3 Platform, an integrated telephony solution combining messaging functionality with automated attendant, speech recognition, and interactive voice response capabilities, employing the voice biometrics technology provided by CellMax.
“As identity fraud claims victims rise at an increasing rate, securing access to data from telephony applications has become an urgent requirement of IT and security personnel, whether in the government, public, or private space,” says Yaniv Livneh, CEO of T3 Telecom Software.
Voice biometrics provides an interesting alternative to PINS and passwords, but faces its own security obstacles. Even without passwords, there are many ways for a thief to pretend he is someone else. Voiceprints can be mimicked, digitally recorded, or scrambled. “Criminals have gotten more technically savvy in committing fraud and identity theft, using such approaches as phishing, spyware, Trojans, and other cyber attacks with increasing sophistication,” stated Forrester Research analyst Jonathan Penn in a recent study titled “Strategies for Combating Criminal Fraud.” Penn noted that more effort and resources are going into the design and perpetration of these attacks, and so they have become far more technically complex, both in their exploitation of vulnerabilities and targeting of particular organizations and user groups.
“The issue is that the fraudsters are really clever people, and some just exist to destroy systems,” Markowitz says. “Sometimes they are hacking into systems for bragging rights, other times for monetary gains.”
