Some facilities or computing devices may require an authentication to be performed prior to allowing access to a user. For example, some facilities may employ an access control system to perform an authentication of the user to determine whether access to a room, floor, or hallway in the facility should be granted. To do so, the access control system generally relies on the user presenting a smart card at a reader. The reader may then compare credentials from the smart card to a local database and/or an external database stored at a remote server. If the credentials match, the reader may then trigger a lock mechanism to release, allowing access to the user. Similarly, a computing device (e.g., smartphone, laptop, desktop, etc.) may also require an authentication to be performed prior to allowing access to a user of the computer.
Some computing devices may require several different credentials to perform user authentication (e.g., multi-factor authentication). Such multi-factor authentication may require one or more text-based user credentials (e.g., password, passphrase, etc.), biometric authentication factors (e.g., fingerprint, facial, voice, and/or retina scanning), security tokens, and/or other technical authentication measures to determine whether access should be granted. For example, a computing device may require a password and a fingerprint, or passphrase, facial recognition, and a retinal scan, or any combination of biometric authentication factors that result in more than one biometric authentication factor being used. However, many of these authentication methods may be compromised by theft. Additionally, in some environments (e.g., a healthcare facility), different computing devices may require different credentials. As such, the user may be required to recall a number of different credentials and/or provide different biometrics to the different computing devices throughout a given period of time.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds