A team at the University of Kent’s Electronic Engineering Laboratories, led by Dr Michael Fairhurst, has developed an approach to identifying fradulent signatures, based on the Inmos Ltd Transputer processor. Working closely with the British Technology Group – recently bought out by its management (CI No 1,880), the research team is trying to establish a viable system and hopes to see the marketing of automatic signature verification become a reality. The British Technology Group’s role in the project is in filing for patents on the technology being used, and in acting as an agent between the university team and any companies that might be interested in taking up the technology as the basis for a commercial product – such as a retail outlet or bank teller machine, which needs to verify signature in a matter of minutes or seconds. What the Kent team has developed is an MS-DOS-based software package, written in C, which runs on standard iAPX-86 personal computers. Dr Fairhurst of the Kent research team says his system is more complex than conventional signature verification systems. It works on the basis that signatures are very personal and can vary each time they are written. The Kappa system uses a tailored set of verification criteria for each person – a set of samples is used to select the most reliable set of features for that individual. Dr Fairhurst says this approach has led to the system’s success in early trials. Peter Hawkes of the British Technology Group notes that, with current electronic signature verification systems, as many as 2% of users – the general public – are rejected when they sign a valid signature, which of course just isn’t adequate. The Kappa system gets round this problem of irregular signatures by referral – if the system really can’t decide, it refers the signature to a human who either makes a decision on comparison with the card’s signature, or employs a slightly different software algorithm, included in Kappa, which requires the signer to write out her date of birth or address. Hawkes points to two markets for the Kappa system. First, he says, there is the golden application of checking up on bank cardholders. He notes, however, that this is probably some years away, and may well depend on banks moving over to Smart Cards, which lend themselves well to the Kappa technology. Second, there is the yet-to-really-take-off pen computing market, where the Kappa system could be used to check authorised user access to secure data held on mainframe hosts. An earlier stab at signature verification technology – Verisign – developed by a Dr Park under sponsorship from the British Technology Group from work done at the National Physical Laboratory, has been taken up by Frome, Somerset-based Peripheral Vision Ltd, which markets the technology as an option under Go Corp’s PenPoint pen operating system. Hawkes says the Kent system employs a more elaborate algorithm than Verisign, being able to cope with the signatures of two or three users, or several million. The Transputer-based hardware comes into play only at the stage where the user’s signature is being encoded and analysed in the first instance. The user goes into a back room in her local bank, say, and signs her name perhaps five times on some sort of electronic tablet or pen-based computer. The data is then taken across to the MS-DOS personal computer, which is boosted in power by an add-in board featuring a parallel array of half a dozen Transputer processors, where some 16 to 25 stable features are noted from the signature samples – the number of loops in the lettering, or the time taken to sign. These features then become the criteria for identifying whether or not future signatures of that name are valid or forged. The Kappa system is about to go into beta test, and won’t be available for another six months, so its too early to talk about any interested parties. Hawkes says the cost of the software will be negligible – the cost, per unit, shouldn’t be more than the cost of a manual embosser-slides still used in many retail outlets for pro
cessing credit card transactions. – Sue Norris
