Palm Identity Network
A hand is harder to forge than a document.
The Palm Identity Network verifies a person by the pattern of veins beneath the skin of their palm. It is the identity and payments project inside Hurman.
Near-infrared light is absorbed by the blood in the vein, so the pattern reads as dark against the surrounding tissue. That pattern sits below the surface, which makes it resistant to the wear, scarring and manual labour that defeat fingerprint systems, and it cannot be lifted from a surface someone touched. The comparison returns a decision, not an image. A person is recognised, or they are not.
Enrolment does not require a prior document, so a register can be built from the people themselves. Terminals are built for intermittent connectivity and shared use, because a system that works only where the power and the network are reliable has not been tested.
PID is used by public bodies establishing identity at population scale, and by banks, employers and operators verifying a person at a counter. For government. For enterprise.
Questions
Common questions
What is the Palm Identity Network?
The Palm Identity Network (PID) is a biometric identity system built by Hurman Technologies Group. It verifies a person by the pattern of veins beneath the skin of their palm, read with near-infrared light. PID is used to enrol people into a register, to confirm that a returning person is the same person, and to authorise payments at a terminal.
Is a palm image stored?
No. The captured image is converted to a template and the image is discarded. A template is a one-way representation: it is sufficient to compare against a later reading, and it cannot be reversed into a picture of a hand. A template taken from one deployment is not portable to another.