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Diskdrive pioneer tackling identity theft
By John Pletz November 03, 2015
Finis Conner thinks he has a fix for some of the highprofile hacks that have compromised government and
private companies' databases with identities of employees, customers and patients.
His ideas go beyond chipandpin, which is why he's focused on big business and government customers
instead of consumers.
Conner, a Silicon Valley pioneer who made his name and fortune in the disk drive business a generation ago
but now lives in Chicago, has raised $2.5 million for his product. It's a smartcard and mobile app that relies on
biometrics and encryption to protect sensitive information.
The idea is to store biometrics—such as fingerprints, voiceprints, facial recognition and iris scans—on a
card. Using Bluetooth, a processor and 8 gigabytes of memory, the device communicates with a computer, a
door lock or a smartphone, verifying the identity of a user. Conner says the technology could replace traditional
employee ID cards, passwords and PINs with a single device that's more secure and easier to use.
Conner's company, BluStor, is introducing its technology to developers this week at the Octane Medical Device
& Investor Forum in Irvine, Calif., in hopes of getting software developers who build software for the medical
community to begin using it.
“We want to become the platform of choice,” said Conner, who was a pioneer in computer disk drives, first
as a cofounder of Seagate and later with Conner Peripherals. “We're focused on the things that are critically
important for corporations and the medical sector, which is having terrible time with fraud and identity theft.
“In the mobile and connected world, two things must be done for security: prove you are who you say you are,
and you are authorized to do what you're requesting.”
Ideally, BluStor's smartcard could carry patients' medical records, allowing them to take their data with them. It
would reduce the amount of time doctors, hospitals and insurance companies spend processing paper forms,
increase security and make it easier for patients to provide their medical records to new providers. If the cards
are stolen, they're useless to thieves because they require a biometric match to be accessed.
CHANGE IS HARD
Conner, 71, faces an uphill climb.
Consumers have proven to be a tough sell. And despite several years of increasingly bolder, bigger and more
serious hacks and security breaches, banks and retailers are only now moving from magneticstripe technology,
which is fraught with security risks, to more secure cards with computer chips. The rollout is painfully slow.
"We don't think the payments industry is the place to start," says Charlie Sander, who worked for him at Conner
Peripherals and now serves on BluStor's board.
Hospitals and governments, who notoriously slow to adopt new technology, won't be easy.
Conner has been working on BluStor for about four years, solving the technology challenges.
“The big problem was how do we fit all the technology on something size of credit card in a way that battery
consumption is low?” says Mark Bennett, a former technology executive at CME Group who is chief operating
officer of BluStor.
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They've benefited from the wearables industry, which has reduced the size, cost and power consumption of
many of the components, as well as more widespread use of biometrics, thanks to adoption of fingerprints in
smartphones by Apple and others.
There still has some hurdles to overcome to gain widespread adoption. It's another card or device for people to
carry, though the increasing frequency of identity theft and the pain it causes may convince users to put up
with some inconvenience. Because of the computing power onboard, the cards need to be charged, perhaps
after a year or two, depending on the application.
But Conner has changed industries before, like the diskdrive business. He knows it takes only one customer—
like Apple or Compaq—to get the ball rolling.
"Finis has always been a visionary, thinking about how things could be," Sander says. “There's always a big hill
to climb.”
