An new investment round of 810,000 euros for the startup ToothPic has been signed by the Club degli Investitori and the venture capital fund Vertis Venture 3 Tech Transfer (managed by Vertis SGR). The latter had already entered the startup's share capital in 2018, thanks to a €300,000 seed round that arrived via ITAtech, a shared platform of the European Investment Fund and Cassa Depositi e Prestiti.
ToothPic, a startup incubated by the3P and founded in 2016 as a spinoff of the Politecnico di Torino, owns four patents regarding MFA (Multifactor Authentication) technology: the proposed solution transforms the smartphone into a unique access key for online authentication, eliminating the use of passwords or external devices.
The technology used originates from an observation and an intuition of four university researchers from the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications of the Politecnico, the co-founders of ToothPic: the camera of each smartphone has a kind of unique and inimitable fingerprint since the photo sensor of each device is characterized by a series of unique imperfections, due to the physical properties of the silicon that compose it. Leveraging this unique feature of each device, it is possible to turn it into a secure key for online authentication of its owner.
Every time an account is accessed or a payment is made, the software automatically captures a series of images through the camera and verifies the sensor fingerprint, using it to generate a cryptographic key. In this way, the system can verify that the request actually came from the user's device, authorizing it to complete the transaction. In this way, the security of the credentials is guaranteed since they are in fact never exposed to risks, since the operations are finalized thanks to a physical feature of the smartphone and, consequently, not hackable. The system has achieved compliance with the latest security and regulatory standards of the European Union: PSD2, FIDO2, FIDO U2F and WebAuthn.
