Homomorphic Encryption, Secure Shares and MPC Come Together To Protect Us

Your biometrics — such as your fingerprints, your face, and your iris — are some of your most sensitive data captures. Why? Well, there’s the risk of a playback of your data, but mostly because they clearly identify you as a person. As we increasingly use MFA (Multifactor Authentication) to gain access to systems, we must thus make sure that our biometric models are kept in a secure manner.

Overall, we typically do not store an image of the scan but convert it to a model that can be compared. The most common comparison is to analyse the distance between the scanned model and the stored model — often known as the Euclidean distance. So, when your face is scanned, it basically records key measurements around your face, such as the length of your nose:

Now Sam Altman’s organisation — Worldcoin Foundation — has released a new version of its iris scanning software that uses SMPC (Secure Multiparty Computation), Secret Shares and Homomorphic Encryption [here]: