International Business Machines Assigned Patent for On Chip Verification and Consequent Enablement of Card OS Operation in Smart Cards

By Targeted News Service

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 2 -- International Business Machines, Armonk, N.Y., has been assigned a patent (8,253,531) developed by four co-inventors for an "on chip verification and consequent enablement of card OS operation in smart cards." The co-inventors are John F. Davis, Durham, N.C., Sheldon M. Osborne, Rochester, Minn., Frederick I. Reed III, Cary, N.C., and Wei Kai Xie, Shanghai, China.

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "On Chip Smart Card verification of a cardholder using biometrics such as a fingerprint and consequent enablement of a card operating system, having an additional software layer boot prior to the commercial card operating system booting. This software layer, or boot loader, provides the drivers and functionality for the finger print sensor and on-card matching. If the cardholder is successfully authenticated, the unmodified commercial OS is then allowed to boot. If the cardholder does not authenticate with the boot loader then the card does not boot the card operating system and thus cannot be used for financial transactions."

The patent application was filed on March 26, 2009 (12/411,631). The full-text of the patent can be found at http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=8,253,531&OS=8,253,531&RS=8,253,531

Written by Arpi Sharma; edited by Anand Kumar.

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