Modernization of Biometric Capture

The Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) requires the capability to collect biometrics from “Blue Force” groups like Department of Defense (DoD) Service Members and their family members, DoD Contractors and Government Civilians. DMDC processes the biometrics and stores them but also desires to leverage the stored biometrics from these groups to facilitate identification, verification and authentication. Today, DoD authoritative databases like the DoD Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) are storing collected multi-modal (e.g., finger, face, iris and voice) biometrics but there is no tieback to the DoD ABIS to complete processes like: granting access to a secure facility through an iris reader mounted outside the door, gaining vehicle access to an installation through an unattended access control lane after presenting a face to a camera or granting access to a building after an user presents their fingerprint on a reader mounted beside the entry door. Even the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Next Generation Identification (NGI) system, which contains hundreds of millions of palm prints, irises, and faces does not facilitate the aforementioned processes for gaining access to a structure, nor does it support login to a secure network. Only Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) HART is facilitating access and that access is to the United States (U.S) of America. To determine the feasibility of integrating and adapting current biometric technologies to begin supporting DMDC’s desire to begin using biometrics for person verification and authentication, Secure Planet, Inc. (SP) a service-disabled veteran-owned small business that has specialized in biometrics for over 10-years, proposes to complete a Phase I SBIR project to examine several things in support of delivering a report. The Phase 1 SBIR will study biometric collection, secure biometric storage, the benefits of employing biometric fusion (The use of multiple biometric samples in a biometrics system to increase the confidence level that an individual is who they say they are. These samples can be collected through different modalities resulting in multimodal fusion, or multiple samples from a single modality or even a single sensor can be employed for fusion), cloud-based biometric collection, storage and retrieval of biometrics in support of biometric identification and verification. Additionally, security will be a major focus of this Phase I SBIR study. Not only are today’s biometric repositories not being integrated to cull the stored biometric data in support of identity and verification efforts, but they are also not setup to complete a secure exchange of biometric data that contains PII. SP hopes to identify methods of securing data at rest and data while in transit as well as introduce digital security concepts like a “cryptographic nonce,” which ensure that the old communications cannot be reused in replay attacks.