• U.K. government looking for identity verification solutions

    The U.K. government is soliciting ideas on potential requirements for the public sector on all aspects of identity verification and authentication; this is particularly relevant to online and telephone channels, and the notice says the services include the provision of related software and computer services

  • 3M acquires biometric specialist Cogent for $943 million

    Cogent Systems participates in the $4 billion global biometric market, which is projected to grow at a rate greater than 20 percent per year; identification and authentication solutions from 3M include border management products; document manufacturing and issuance systems for IDs, passports, and visas; document readers and verification products; and security materials, such as laminates, to protect against counterfeiting and tampering; Cogent Systems provides finger, palm, face, and iris biometric systems for governments, law enforcement agencies, and commercial enterprises

  • Automatic heart-beat recognition authentication for iPhone users?

    To make iPhones and iPads more secure, Apple is considering implementing automatic biometric authentication technologies on the devices; the authentication procedure will lock the device and wipe all data on it in the event an unauthorized user tries to operate it; the technology may also report back to Apple in the event customers have jailbroken or unlocked the device, allowing the company to deny services to these customers

  • U.S. military personnel increasingly using biometric technology

    Since the Department of Defense implemented biometric identification technology, military personnel have seen benefits such as quickly identifying known terrorists, collecting intelligence on insurgent activities, and identifying former detainees the military had released

  • Biometrics replaces traditional means of identification

    Access cards, PINs, and passwords, designed to protect end-users, are not only ineffective against modern day threats, but often end up being used to perpetrate crime; card-based systems will only control the access of authorized pieces of plastic, but not who is in possession of the card; one of the benefits of a biometric technology is that only authorized people — not merely their credentials — are granted access to, for example, a building, a specific part of a building or even a computer or an account

  • Toward a national strategy for online identification

    President Obama has launched an ambitious project — National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace — the primary goal of which is to build a cybersecurity-based identity management vision and strategy that addresses privacy and civil liberties interests, leveraging privacy-enhancing technologies for the nation; offline, there are already dozens of identification technologies in play that go beyond the simplicity of Social Security numbers, birth certificates, drivers licenses, and passports; these include smart cards, mobile phones, biometrics — but they do not follow a consistent standard; this, too, may soon change

  • Angel offers voice identification solution for the health care industry

    With its Customer Experience Platform, Angel aims to authenticate phone conversations for doctors, patients, and pharmaceutical sales reps using voice biometrics; the software-as-a-service technology is used by pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca, companies in the financial industry such as Bank of America

  • Distinguishing friend from foe: Afghani biometrics database expanded

    In 2009 there were more than 200,000 biometric enrollments put into the biometric identification system operated by Coalition forces in Afghanistan — a system aiming to determine whether members of the Afghan population are insurgents or innocent; 210,000 have been added already in 2010; the military’s goal is to get to 1.65 million enrollments; the Coalition is currently in the process of contracting out an Afghan company to provide Afghan enrollers to go around the country and work at border crossing points, international airports, district headquarters and district jails

  • AOptix unveils InSight VM iris recognition system

    InSight VM from AOptix Technologies features what the company describes as “an elegant and contemporary industrial design” that is appropriate for installation in public spaces such as modern airports and office buildings; The InSight VM operates at a nominal 2-meter stand-off distance and employs the company’s proprietary Adaptive Optics technology

  • Biometric vending machines come to the U.S.

    Trials are underway for next generation vending machines; users would be able to link their thumbprint to a credit card, so all they would have to do to buy a bag of chips would be their thumbprint on the reader, then off they go

  • LaserCard to supply additional optical security cards for Italy's Carta d'Identita Elettronica

    The optical security media cards from Mountain View, California-based LaserCard are already used in the U.S. Green Card, the Saudi Arabian and Angolan National ID Cards, the Costa Rica Foreign Resident Card, the Hungarian Professional Driver License, and vehicle registration programs for three state authorities in India; Italy used them in its Carta d’Identita Elettronica, and it orders more of them

  • VoiceKeyID from Porticus

    Relative to other biometric technologies, the pace of adoption of voice biometrics has been rather slow; this may now change owing to an innovative solution from a Massachusetts-based company; Porticus offers a voice biometric authentication application which is not only robust and inexpensive, but which is uniquely suitable to an economy - and society - in which reliance on mobile devices is growing; there are some twelve vendors — none of them American — who offer voice identification software; Porticus, however, is the only company that has developed voice identification software that resides in the device itself rather than on the network; the solution also has intriguing military and intelligence applications

  • All U.S. counties on Mexican border now share inmate fingerprints with feds

    All 25 U.S. counties along the Mexican border are now enrolled in the Secure Communities project; federal immigration officials now have access to the prints of every inmate booked into jail in these counties; Secure Communities makes the notification automatic; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which plans to implement the program nationwide by 2013, says the program has identified more than 262,900 illegal immigrants in jails and prisons who have been charged with or convicted of criminal offenses, including more than 39,000 charged with or convicted of violent offenses or major drug crimes; ICE expects to remove 400,000 illegal immigrants this year; of the 200,000 illegal immigrants deported in the first ten months of fiscal year 2010, 142,000 illegal immigrants were with criminal records and about 50,000 were noncriminals; immigrant advocates say that some counties use Secure Communities to deport noncriminals: the national average of noncriminals flagged by Secure Communities is about 28 percent, but in Travis County, Texas, 82 percent of those removed through Secure Communities were noncriminals

  • The promise, and risks, of battlefield biometrics

    Using biometric devices in Afghanistan offers many benefits to coalition forces and to the Afghani themselves in making it easier to separate the good guys from the bad; some worry, however, that this can backfire — as was the case in Rwanda in 1994: identification cards which included photos and tribal affiliations of either Tutsis and Hutus made it easier for Hutu militias to identify the Tutsi and murder them

  • Aging irises would hobble biometric identity checks based on iris recognition

    Confirming someone;s identity through iris recognition involves matching a new scan of their iris — done, say, at an airport check point — against templates in a library. The systems are designed to cope with the fact that the scanning process is slightly variable, so two scans of the same eye will be slightly different; researchers have evidence that the degree of difference between any two scans — called the Hamming distance — increases over time for scans of the same eye