Apple Buys Melbourne's AuthenTec for $356 Million

ORLANDO - Apple has bought Melbourne-based AuthenTec, a company that makes secure fingerprint sensors for $356 million. AuthenTec mainly provides fingerprint sensor chips, which are common across the industry. While the work that AuthenTec does is widely known in the tech industry, there is nothing concrete about what Apple is hoping to gain from buying AuthenTec or what technology it is expecting from AuthenTec to put into its own devices.

>Authentic provides mobile security solutions for various platforms, including Android. Authentic as also worked with Apple in the past, providing security solutions for Mac OS, providing fingerprint scanning solutions for Mac OS X. Most recently, AuthenTec signed a mobile VPN agreement with Samsung for its Android devices.