The 21st-century sentries: Waltec Biometrics

Hollywood writers love to sprinkle their sci-fi scripts with ultramodern biometric devices. Closer to home, a Belgian company has turned this futuristic technology into a real-life, flourishing business.

May 2010. Rudi Lassine is busy in Shanghai. “We’re just a few hours away from the Expo opening,” he says. Lassine and his colleagues are working behind the scenes of Shanghai Expo 2010, the gigantic six-month cultural event. Now, they are busy putting the finishing touches to their projects in the Belgian and European Union pavilion. Firstly, Waltec Biometrics is responsible for securing the whole back office of the 5,000-square-metre pavilion. This means “controlling access and managing 400 employees – all through biometrics and, in particular, individual recognition by fingerprints,” Lassine explains. In addition, in some parts of the pavilion, Waltec Biometrics developed specific solutions to count visitors. For instance, biometric devices monitor the number of guests entering the pavilion, display the numbers on an LCD screen and feed the data into two ecological projects.

Long before this Chinese adventure, Lassine spent 13 years working in the IT department of a bank in Luxembourg. He then decided to set up his own company and chose Wallonia as its home. Waltec Biometrics started off in 2005 with capital of €150,000; four years later, the company’s turnover had reached €2 million. From selling existing products, Lassine moved on to developing tailor-made solutions. “What I love is pioneering new technologies and responding to a market need,” he says. Accordingly, about 40 percent of the company’s budget is devoted to research and development, so it keeps coming up with sophisticated, user-friendly technologies. These have convinced a vast range of clients, from banks in Luxembourg to the police headquarters in Liège, to psychiatric hospitals and even the Finance Ministry of Gabon. A total of 95 percent of Waltec Biometrics’ income is from exports, in particular to France or Luxembourg.

High-tech solutions

Typically, access to protected areas (your bank account, your house or office, your electronic mailbox) is secured by something you know (such as a PIN code or password) or by something you have (such as a key or swipe card). In contrast, biometrics is about securing access by something you simply are. No need to hang on to a key or badge, no need to write down or remember a complicated code: in principle, you ‘carry’ your fingerprint, your iris or your voice with you at all times. Ideally, these personal traits shouldn’t change over time, and should be unique to you. Also, they must be easy to capture, store in a computer, retrieve and compare to that of other people.

A biometric device can do either a one-to-one comparison to check that a fingerprint belongs to a specific user, or a one-to-many comparison to make sure the print belongs to someone in a group – be it a company’s employees or the FBI’s list of potential terrorists. In 2008, the US bureau said it would award a 10-year, $1bn contract to help create a giant biometric database. Not just fingerprints, but also eye scans or tattoo shots, to allow the US government to monitor criminals more quickly and easily. This announcement upset privacy advocates who feared a subtle invasion of citizens’ personal lives – but biometric technology is already making its way into society.

Understandably, demand for such equipment is high in sensitive sectors such as banking, medical care, IT and civil protection. Waltec Biometrics’ expertise is strongest “in the medical area, and in particular in backoffice technologies”. For instance, the company developed a novel solution for Inserm (the French national institute for medical research). The institute needed a tailor-made system to control access to its labs: it wanted to make sure researchers who had been exposed to potential contaminants didn’t enter protected, clean areas. Fingerprint-controlled access ensures researchers comply with appropriate periods for decontamination. “This had never been done before, and our solution, Touch’eos, allowed to us to respond to a specific demand,” explains Lassine (pictured).

Biometric future?

Will this kind of technology ever penetrate our daily lives? In the UK, some schools use fingerprint scanners to speed up administrative procedures at the canteen or library: children simply press their fingers to deduct money from their school meal account, or to borrow books. Will we soon be using iris recognition at the supermarket till to confirm payment? Will fingerprint identification ever supplant our good old lock and key? “I’ve already seen prototypes of credit cards using biometrics,” Lassine says. “It’s amazing to imagine how this kind of effortlessness could enter our daily life – but it’s not going to happen tomorrow.” For now, Waltec Biometrics focuses on developing specific solutions for businesses. “To be honest, we don’t worry much about the general public,” Lassine admits. “Our target is particularly sensitive to security and the value of the goods it wants to protect or manage.”

Some high-end car-makers have already fitted their vehicles with fingerprint ignition systems. In 2005, thieves in Malaysia cut off the finger of a Mercedes S-Class owner to be able to steal his car. This radical example made the headlines and highlighted the fact that no security system is 100 percent safe. Science-fiction movies are also replete with characters fooling biometric access controls. In Alien 4, a breath recognition system is cracked by using a spray; in Entrapment, the character uses a fake eye to get round a retina scan. These examples might fire our imagination, but Rudi Lassine’s real-life preoccupations are different. “Every security system is by definition susceptible to piracy. People will spend hours and hours trying to crack a system, sometimes just for the challenge,” he explains. “For me, biometrics is not inviolable, but it brings a real ease of use. We work primarily on this, not on high security.” He continues with an example: “Have you ever had to walk back because you had forgotten your badge to get into the office? This has happened to me too often,” Lassine laughs. “Now, imagine you just place your finger on a sensor to enter the office…”

This is already happening at Waltec Biometrics. While the head offices are located in Léglise, in the Walloon province of Luxembourg, Lassine picked the Galaxia European Space Applications Park in Transinne for the sales and support offices “because it has a thorough, modern infrastructure, a dynamic image and good highway access.” The businessman smiles: “We arrived too late, otherwise we would have equipped all of Galaxia with a biometric system! It’s just a matter of time. We have already developed a version of Touch’eos for business centres.”

www.waltec.be

This article first appeared in WAB magazine