The lock that reads your veins
On a morning in June 2004, inside a Suruga Bank branch in Shizuoka, Japan, a customer approached the teller and was asked to hold her palm about four centimeters above a small scanner without touching anything. Near-infrared light flooded upward through her skin. The deoxygenated hemoglobin in her veins absorbed it; everything else let it pass. A camera captured the branching lattice of dark lines — unique to her — and matched it against the template on file. Transaction cleared. No card swiped, no PIN entered, no fingerprint pressed to any surface. The credential she was presenting was inside her.
Fujitsu Laboratories had spent two years solving a problem that had quietly hampered fingerprint scanners: people didn’t want to touch them. In trials, women in particular raised hygiene objections, a Fujitsu representative told Computerworld, and iris scanners made customers feel processed rather than served. The palm reader was contactless — which solved the hygiene problem — and it read something internal, which solved the security problem. A fingerprint can be lifted off a glass and reproduced. A vein pattern, buried under a centimeter of skin, cannot appear on any surface because it never reaches one.
Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi followed by October 2004, installing one palm vein ATM in each of its 250 branches. The two banks even handled data differently: Suruga stored biometric templates on a central server; Tokyo-Mitsubishi, acutely sensitive to data-leak risk, encoded each template onto the customer’s own cash card, so the bank itself never held it. Hiroshima Bank and Bank of Ikeda followed. International sales launched in 2005.
The technology spread from bank branches into hospitals — where it identified patients too ill to state their name — and into pharmaceutical dispensing cabinets, data centres, and government checkpoints. In May 2018, Fujitsu announced that PalmSecure had shipped its one millionth sensor, with an estimated 73 million daily users across sixty countries.
Then someone pointed it at a front door.
At CES 2026 in Las Vegas, on January 7, Xthings revealed the ULTRALOQ Bolt Sense: a residential deadbolt combining 3D facial recognition with a palm vein scanner. Approach the door; the lock reads your face; if that fails — bad light, a hat, a scarf — it falls through to the palm. Both modes are contactless. The Bolt Sense shipped in mid-2026 for under $300. Twenty-two years after Suruga Bank, the same sensor that had guarded Japanese cash drawers was available on Amazon.
The history of locks is a history of credentials that have gotten progressively harder to copy. The warded key required a custom-shaped bit; the Bramah cylinder a precision-machined shaft; the chip-embedded car fob a cryptographic handshake; the phone-based digital key a Secure Enclave and a signed certificate. The palm vein scanner dispenses with the credential entirely. What it asks of you is only that blood keep moving.
Sources
- Japanese banks choose vein-recognition security system — Computerworld — Suruga Bank (June 2004, 65 branches) and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi (October 2004, 250 ATM branches); hygiene findings from Fujitsu representative; data-storage approaches.
- Fujitsu passes 1 million sales of PalmSecure palm vein sensors — Biometric Update — 2018 sales milestone; 73 million daily users across 60 countries; sectors served.
- CES 2026: The Ultraloq Bolt Sense Smart Lock Uses Palm Vein and Facial Recognition — MacRumors — January 7, 2026 CES announcement; dual-biometric residential deadbolt; Q2 2026 shipping timeline.