Patent ID: 8255697

Claim:
A portable biometrics access device, comprising: a device interface, being electronic or mechanical or both, for coupling the device to an access-limited apparatus, device, network or system, and an integrated circuit (IC) providing increased security by bridging the functionality of fingerprint input from a user and, upon positive authentication of the user's fingerprint to provide secure communication with said access-limited apparatus, device, network or system, said IC comprising: a central processor communicating with the other on-chip components via a high speed bus, a secure internal non-volatile memory connected to the high-speed bus, wherein the non-volatile memory either stores program code, administrative software, tailored security output responses and fingerprint representations in the form of compact fingerprint minutiae securely within the IC or is capable of storing encryption seeds for sensitive data stored on an external non-volatile memory, a first memory interface block connected to the high speed bus for interfacing with volatile memory and for providing working memory available to other modules on the IC, a second memory interface block connected to the high speed bus for interfacing with non-volatile memory, for alternative storing of program code, administrative software, tailored security output responses and fingerprint representations in the form of compact fingerprint minutiae, being encrypted internally in the IC by encryption seeds from an encryption block, a first interface block coupled to a fingerprint sensor, an image capture and pre-processing block connected to the first interface block, said image capture and pre-processing block being adapted to perform the initial processing of raw fingerprint images captured from the sensor into a dataset of reduced size, denoted intermediate fingerprint data, the intermediate fingerprint data being submitted as output to the central processor via the high speed bus for final processing to compact fingerprint minutiae on the central processor, one or more encryption modules connected to the high-speed bus for providing encryption information, or alternatively scrambling information, the central processor being adapted to apply the encryption information to the fingerprint data for producing secured data as an output to the high speed bus, and one or more second interface blocks for supplying the secured data to the external access-limited apparatus, device or system via the device interface.