Patent ID: 8406428

Claim:
A system for on-demand authentication of a user as an owner of an avatar interacting in a virtual world environment, said system comprising: means for issuing, from a first computing device, a temporary challenge to the user interacting in said virtual world environment at a second computing device, said temporary challenge issued with limited time life for authenticating the user, and said temporary challenge being encrypted with a public key of said user, said public key employed as part of a public key encryption algorithm; means for receiving, at said second computing device, said temporary challenge with limited time life, said second computing device having a memory storage device including a protected memory storing a private key of the user; means for decrypting said received temporary challenge with said private key; means for capturing biometric information of the user in response to the received temporary challenge from the first computing device; means for hashing the biometric information at said second computing device; means for encrypting the hash of the captured biometric information concatenated with the received challenge as an encrypted response, said encrypting means employing said stored private user key of the user; means for returning the encrypted response to the first computing device; and means for authenticating the user at said first computing device by processing the encrypted challenge within a limited amount of time.