Tokyo, February 26, 2025 - NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) has developed biometric based digital signature technology that enables highly accurate face recognition without storing facial information. This technology allows for safer and more secure authentication with less risk of facial information leakage.

Technology Outline

The market for face recognition is constantly expanding, and its use is progressing in areas such as payment and access control. However, the need for strict management of facial information, such as face images and features extracted from face images, is becoming a burden for service providers.

NEC’s newly developed technology can generate keys for individuals even from facial information that changes between registration and authentication. Rather than verifying the match of facial information itself, face authentication is achieved by verifying the match of the keys generated from facial information, making it unnecessary to store facial information. Features of the technology include the following:

1. Highly Accurate and Fast Authentication by Estimating Fluctuation

Facial information changes every time, even for the same person, due to factors such as facial orientation, facial expression, and the surrounding environment. This poses the risk of generating keys for another individual. NEC has developed an algorithm that generates a person’s own key from facial information that changes with each shot. The algorithm estimates the fluctuations between the facial information at registration and authentication and evaluates a person as someone else if the estimated fluctuation is significant. This prevents the generation of a wrong person’s key and achieves the same high accuracy as conventional face recognition. Matching only keys with slight fluctuations reduces the computational cost and achieves high-speed processing that can withstand large-scale authentication.

2. Secure authentication without risk of key leakage

There is a risk of key leakage in authentication methods using keys. NEC has developed a secure computation method that can verify the matching of the generated keys while keeping them protected. This technology carries out the entire authentication process, from generation to verification of the keys, in an encrypted manner. This eliminates the risk of key leakage and enables safe and secure face recognition.

This technology is applicable to all biometric modalities, not just face.

Since the technology can generate digital signatures compliant with standard digital signature methods such as ECDSA (*1) and EdDSA (*2), it can also be used to prove the authenticity of electronic documents, electronic contracts, digital asset transactions, and the presentation of digital credentials.

NEC will begin demonstrating this technology for applications such as payment and access control during fiscal year 2025.

NEC will showcase this technology at RETAILTECH JAPAN 2025 from March 4 (Tue.) to 7 (Fri.) at Tokyo Big Sight.
 

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Note:

(*1) ECDSA

A digital signature algorithm based on elliptic curves. It has been standardized by the U.S. NIST under FIPS 186-5 and is included in the “e-Government Recommended Ciphers List” issued by CRYPTREC in Japan.

(*2) EdDSA

A digital signature algorithm based on the Edwards curve. It is standardized by the U.S. NIST under FIPS 186-5 and is included in the “e-Government Recommended Cipher List” issued by CRYPTREC in Japan.