TSA approves first biometric products for airport screening

Better late than never. Three years after being instructed to establish a “qualified products list” for airport screening programs, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has named the first products to qualify. GCN’s Patrick Marshall reports that of seven products that vendors submitted for testing, four were approved for the list. Two of them — V-Station from Markham, Ontario-based Bioscrypt, and ID-Gate from South Pasadena, California-based Cogent Systems — combine keypads, fingerprint scanners, and smart-card scanners. Two fingerprint sensors from Albuquerque, New Mexico-based Lumidigm also won approval.

Rick Lazarick, chief scientist at El Segundo, California-based Computer Sciences Corp.’s Identity Labs and a consultant to TSA, said the testing was run directly by TSA, but was performed by New York-based International Biometric Group (IBG). The test involved 250 volunteer subjects. Guidelines set by TSA required successful products to deliver results with false-acceptance rates and false-rejection rates of less than 1 percent, and the transaction time had to be shorter than six seconds. Lazarick said TSA funded only the preparation of laboratories to make sure they were ready to accept the devices. Manufacturers were required to pay a fee of $25,000. “That fee-for-service model will go into the future,” he said. Observers also took note of the fact that of the dozens of biometric vendors in the marketplace, only a few participated in the initial round of TSA testing. Slef-selection may have worked here: The requirements for products were spelled out in detail in a 140-page “Guidance Package: Biometrics for Airport Access Control,” and some vendors may have decided that their products or technologies could not meet the requirements. Amy Kudwa, a TSA spokeswoman, said vendors might be deterred from participating when they see the specific requirements. “You’re going to see plenty of marketing brochures and people talk about how they have the silver bullet technology security solution,” she said, but when they have to deliver specific capabilities with specific requirements for uptime, many vendors suddenly disappear.