Hoyos Labs, a start-up digital infrastructure company based in New York City, is demonstrating its HoyosID biometric authentication app at the CES exhibition that is currently under way in Las Vegas.

The HoyosID app is designed to replace user names and passwords as well as hardware-based authentication technology. Instead, it uses the camera on Android-based devices and iPhones for real-time iris and facial pattern acquisition and user authentication.

Hoyos Labs said its identification process takes less than a minute and allows users to access multiple sites — from Facebook to online banking services — on their desktop devices. The app also includes a "liveness" detector that can distinguish a real person from an image or video.

"One hindrance to the widespread adoption of biometrics to date is that people are hesitant to carry around another token to confirm their identities — it's just one more thing to lose," Hector Hoyos, CEO of Hoyos Labs, said in a news release. "At Hoyos Labs, we understand that the solution isn't in the hardware itself. This is why we focused on creating a technology that will work with mobile devices as most people are already carrying their phones everywhere that they travel."

The HoyosID app works with the digital infrastructure of Hoyos Labs. "Biometrics is not an end in itself," Hoyos said. "Rather, it is one piece of the identity assertion puzzle that needs a secure back-end to work effectively, and we have created a secure ecosystem that will benefit both customers and corporations."

In addition to introducing HoyosID at CES, the company also issued the Biometric Open Protocol Standards, a set of rules that govern secure communications among a variety of client devices and establish a "gold standard" of integrating biometrics.

Although the Hoyos platform does include its own proprietary biometrics, the platform is "biometrics-agnostic" and supports any other third-party biometric technology through the BOPS standard, Hoyos Labs said.

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