One of our customers Via Touch Media, Inc, is an extremely innovative company in the retail vending world. Recently, they requested research and development work in strong cryptographic standards for storing and retrieving biometric information in the cloud. This later bloomed into additional research and development of a solution for storing, retrieving and validating fingerprint and iris biometrics, in a globally accessible cloud-based system.
During research, we found that there were no security standards outside of government institutions for the type of storage of biometric data that Via Touch Media, Inc had requested. While government standards were certainly aggressive, they were rarely effective for private business due to their heavy-handed nature. Because of this, we decided to borrow from a group of standards to create a custom policy. The standards borrowed from were FIPS 140-3, HIPPA, and PCI in dealing with identifiable customer information. This custom policy requires separate modern ciphers and ephemeral key creation and maceration, for both data in motion and data at rest. This includes ASIC resistant cipher authentication and ephemeral data channels which expire in 120 seconds after being opened.
Talos is primarily being used in secure vending machines designed to use biometrics to identify customers and help pay for items in a highly sophisticated modern redesign of what a vending machine can be. The machines are currently being demoed in various venues such as CES 2017, and Fox News. Talos is expected to be used in a minimum of 40,000 vending machines.
