Between October 2024 and September 2025, PONE Biometrics reinforced its technology base and manufacturing readiness. R&D progressed with BLE development, hardware improvements, and biometric sensor evaluations with NTNU, while planned PQC activities were shifted to a revised timeline to reflect resource constraints. Production at Norautron was strengthened through improved E-ink display yield and optimized processes. Certification activities ensured compliance with FIDO2 and advanced work on Bluetooth and CE/FCC requirements.
In April 2025, PONE Biometrics officially launched the OFFPAD+, the company’s flagship device. The new generation introduced a larger E-ink display for improved user interaction, a dedicated card-holder format for convenience and durability, and USB, NFC, and BLE connectivity to support seamless passwordless authentication across Mac, Windows, and Linux. The production process was adapted accordingly to integrate these new features while improving yield and efficiency.
In parallel, the NTNU team advanced research on fingerprint presentation attack detection (PAD), which underpins the long-term roadmap for secure biometric authentication. Two major works were conducted during 2024–2025:
Unsupervised Fingerphoto Presentation Attack Detection With Diffusion Models: addressing challenges of generalization (detecting novel presentation attack instruments unseen in training) and scalability (reducing the need for large attack datasets). This unsupervised approach, trained only on bona fide samples, achieved promising results against unseen attacks.
On the Feasibility of Detecting Fingerphoto Presentation Attacks using Multimodal Large Language Models: introducing a novel PAD method leveraging multimodal LLMs such as GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0. By applying zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting, the work assessed interpretability, data efficiency, and generalization to unseen attacks.
Together, these achievements demonstrate PONE Biometrics’ commitment to innovation, industrial robustness, and market readiness, while also integrating cutting-edge academic research on biometric security. This dual track of industrial development and academic collaboration positions the company strongly for its next growth phase and future migration to PQC-ready solutions.
OFFPAD AS is a Norwegian start-up company founded in 2017 by Inven2, Petter Taugbøl and Jan-Erik Skaug to commercialize a Norwegian patented an innovative endpoint security product which ambition is to develop the OFFPAD device as an Identity Access Management (IAM) device – A pioneer in wireless, biometric authentication by delivering a high-end smart card with state of the art cryptographic and biometric algorithms protecting users against data breach when accessing their most sensitive data.
This R&D project is based on scientific research on the core technology elements encompassed in the OFFPAD device from leading European scientists in Applied Cryptology, Biometrics authentication, Firmware platforms and eventually Post Quantum Algorithms. The project packages will be executed separately with a vision to incorporate the results in a future innovative wireless personal security device with highest level security combined with ease of use to corporate and institutional users.
This proposed R&D project will create an innovative way to perform biometric authentication by strengthening the existing cryptographic functionalities. By scientific research and validation of post-quantum cryptographics, OFFPAD can potentially be an early adopter and prevent first cyber quantum attacks. This initiative may optimize the existing biometric process and facilitate presentation attack detection (PAD) following international standards relating to robustness against attacks for all non-supervised or semi-supervised applications.
With the need to strengthen the cryptography mechanisms due to the raise of Quantum Computing risks, the OFFPAD device will embed a hybrid solution including FIDO standard and PQC (Post Quantum Cryptography). This will give OFFPAD an opportunity to become a game changer with the perfect mix between high-end biometrics and authentications mechanisms coupled with innovative post-quantum cryptographic features.
