Fulcrum Biometrics' Plan for Research and Development of WS-BD Conformant Handheld Fingerprint Sensor

Trusted biometric validation of individual identities has never been more important. Several contributing factors are the increase in global terrorism, identity theft and the increase in legislation which are driving the accelerated adoption of biometric technology. Unfortunately, the biometrics industry has not actively responded to the changing market conditions being driven by the explosion in mobile computing. These new mobile devices are rapidly replacing traditional desktop and laptops in both commercial and public sector organizations. This project seeks to explore the development of new wireless biometric sensors that deliver biometric data over secure web services. We propose to implement a fully functional wireless biometric fingerprint sensor by starting with an existing microcomputer platform. Although our end goal will be the development of a fully operational prototype device, we primarily aim to understand technical challenges and limitations of implementing the complex embedded web service specified by NIST while also exploring new state of the art secure System on Chips (SoC’s) for future commercial development efforts.