BEDFORD, Mass., May 19, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Aware, Inc. (NASDAQ: AWRE), a leading global provider of biometrics software products, solutions and services, today announced the release of Knomi version 2.6, a market-leading mobile biometric software product. This new version will equip Aware customers with robust passive facial liveness and authentication combined with an additional voice biometric capability – speaker recognition – to provide secure, cost-effective, and convenient access to applications and networks.

Biometric authentication technologies continue to rapidly evolve as more organizations seek to add security while reducing friction. Most two-factor authentication technologies that work to secure identities continue to rely on passwords for user verification. Insecure passwords can lead to security breaches, stolen data, and high management costs with nearly half of all help desk tickets submitted for password resets. With Knomi 2.6, face and speaker recognition are combined into a single platform, providing customers with unique capabilities to deploy multifactor authentication with the convenience of biometrics to enable more secure mobile onboarding and authentication.  

"We are excited to introduce this truly unique product to the market," said Rob Mungovan, Aware's Chief Commercial Officer.  "It's a significant advancement in the ongoing pursuit of strong, secure, passwordless authentication. With Knomi 2.6, our customers can authenticate users through their face or their voice. Additionally, both biometrics can be implemented in a fused approach to ensure a super strong, difficult to repudiate, passwordless authentication. We believe the combination of face plus voice biometrics, with face liveness and voice liveness, make Knomi 2.6 a one-of-a-kind-offering."

Knomi 2.6 includes algorithms for voice "liveness," or anti-spoofing, which is designed to analyze the spoken phrase to ensure it originates from a live human and is not a recording or synthetically generated voice presented by a machine or device – a very similar technique used for Knomi's market proven advanced facial liveness. Knomi 2.6 enables a system to associate a spoken phrase to a specific person in a process similar to face recognition supporting any language, phrase or sentence to verify a user's identity.

"We know firsthand that managing security without compromising privacy is key to our customers, and Knomi 2.6 mobile biometric enrollment and authentication makes the promise possible," said Mohamed Lazzouni, Chief Technology Officer at Aware. "Using face and voice liveness detection running on the user's device, Knomi 2.6 raises the bar on protecting user privacy and security against presentation attacks, with the convenience of taking a selfie and recording a voice memo. An advanced architecture that uses minimal on device software while retaining key processing on the server helps both users and administrators take full advantage of the technology while keeping the management overhead of the platform low, easy to maintain, and highly adaptable to customer needs."

Knomi is a mobile biometric authentication framework that applies a variety of biometric algorithms to enable more secure and convenient mobile onboarding and passwordless authentication experience. Its web services and mobile device SDKs work in concert to perform biometric capture, liveness detection, and matching, with face and voice modalities supported.

More information about Knomi is available on the Aware's product webpage.

About Aware
Aware is a leading provider of productized biometrics software products, solutions and services to governments, system integrators, and commercial organizations and solution providers globally. Our comprehensive portfolio of biometric solutions are based on innovative, robust products designed explicitly for ease of integration including customer-managed and integration ready biometric frameworks, platforms, SDK's and services. They fulfill a broad range of functions critical to secure biometric enrollment, authentication, identity and transactions including face, fingerprint, iris, and voice capture modalities, sample quality assurance, data compliance, capture hardware peripheral and system abstraction, centralized data processing and workflow, subsystem connectivity, and biometric matching algorithms. The products and solutions apply biometrics to enable identity-centric security and know-your-customer ("KYC") solutions for applications including financial institutions, retail, banking and payments, healthcare, border management, credentialing and access control, intelligence and defense, and law enforcement. Aware is a publicly held company (Nasdaq: AWRE) based in Bedford, Massachusetts.

See Aware's website for more information about our biometrics software products.

Safe Harbor Warning

Portions of this release contain forward-looking statements regarding future events and are subject to risks and uncertainties, such as estimates or projections of future revenue and earnings, and the growth of the biometrics markets. Aware wishes to caution you that there are factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results indicated by such statements.

Risk factors related to our business include, but are not limited to: i) our operating results may fluctuate significantly and are difficult to predict; ii) we derive a significant portion of our revenue from government customers, and our business may be adversely affected by changes in the contracting or fiscal policies of those governmental entities; iii) a significant commercial market for biometrics technology may not develop, and if it does, we may not be successful in that market; iv) we derive a significant portion of our revenue from third party channel partners; v) the biometrics market may not experience significant growth or our products may not achieve broad acceptance; vi) we face intense competition from other biometrics solution providers; vii) our business is subject to rapid technological change; viii) our software products may have errors, defects or bugs which could harm our business; ix) our business may be adversely affected by our use of open source software; x) we rely on third party software to develop and provide our solutions and significant defects in third party software could harm our business; xi) part of our future business is dependent on market demand for, and acceptance of, the cloud-based model for the use of software: xii) our operational systems and networks and products may be subject to an increasing risk of continually evolving cybersecurity or other technological risks which could result in the disclosure of company or customer confidential information, damage to our reputation, additional costs, regulatory penalties and financial losses; xiii) our intellectual property is subject to limited protection; xiv) we may be sued by third parties for alleged infringement of their proprietary rights; xv) we must attract and retain key personnel; xvi) we rely on single sources of supply for certain components used in our hardware products; xvii) our business may be affected by government regulations and adverse economic conditions; xviii) we may make acquisitions that could adversely affect our results; xix) we may have additional tax liabilities; and xx) we believe the effects caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will likely have an adverse impact on our revenue over the next several quarters.

We refer you to the documents Aware files from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, specifically the section titled Risk Factors in our annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2019 and other reports and filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Aware and Knomi are registered trademarks of Aware, Inc.

SOURCE Aware, Inc.