Here you can find the Biometric News of Q4 of 2010. (Newest on top).
Every week, a selection of this news has been published in the Weekly Biometrics Newsletter.
You can subscribe to this (free) Newsletter by sending an e-mail to rene.bense@xs4all.nl
A high level conference on Ethics and Governance of Biometrics and Identification Technologies will take place at the Radisson Blu EU Hotel in Brussels on December 9 & 10 2010. Senior government speakers will address the Conference, including Alexander Alvaro, MEP & ALDE Coordinator of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs and Mr. Peter Hustinx, European Data Protection Supervisor. Other high-level speakers from policy, academia, industry and user groups will also address the conference. The conference, chaired by the European Biometrics Forum, Ireland, and the Centre for Science, Society and Citizenship, Italy, will be held in the framework of the RISE (Rising Pan-European and International Awareness of Biometrics and Security Ethics, and HIDE (Homeland Security, Biometric Identification and Personal Detection Ethics, projects, both funded in the scope of European Commission FP7 - Science in Society. In particular, this joint event is regarded as the RISE multi-stakeholder conference and the final conference of the HIDE project.
HIDE's mission is to set up a platform devoted to ethical and privacy issues of biometrics and personal detection technologies which addresses transnational (European) and international problems. HIDE aims to become the preeminent catalyst for innovative policy solutions to emerging ethical problems in the area of surveillance technologies, especially where collaboration among national and international agencies, communities, businesses, and NGOs is crucial. HIDE promotes creative problem solving and provides for concrete tools for a successful dialogue. Conference date : 9 & 10 December 2010
Rising Pan European and International Awareness of Biometrics and Security Ethics (RISE) is an international initiative for promoting Awareness on Ethical Aspects of Biometrics and Security Technologies. RISE will deepen, enlarge, and ensure continuity to European and international dialogue.
To know more on the on www.riseproject.eu and www.hideproject.eu
To apply for free attendance go to: http://www.jotform.com/form/3110702394 or email to cssc@cssc.eu
Next year, a surge in consumer device use in the workplace, increasing levels of cybercrime, and regulatory and compliance requirements will drive investments in information security, predicted Unisys. In 2011, Unisys expects increased investments in biometrics-based protection of mobile devices, token-based encryption for sensitive transactions, port-worker identification systems, business continuity planning, and geographic-based security access systems.
Patricia Titus, chief information security officer at Unisys, told Infosecurity that the most significant information security challenge for 2011 will be the consumerization issues surrounding mobile devices and remote access. Those will have the greatest impact on information security for organizations.
“We will see a lot more targeted attacks against mobile devices and mobile workforce. As devices get smaller, processing times get faster, and the amount of data they store gets larger, we are going to see an increased threat”, she said.
“Employees are driving corporations and governments to move towards allowing people to bring their own devices to work. That’s what is going to drive productivity: giving them the tools they want to use versus the company saying, ‘Here, this is what we are buying and this is what you get’ ”, Titus said.
This consumerization trend poses a number of security challenges for companies. “The boundary where we used to be able to set up all of our perimeter security is blurred. We need to think differently about data security”, she noted.
Morpho, a security and biometrics company, and Cascade Technologies, manufacturer of spectroscopy monitoring systems, announced that they have installed a mid-IR quantum-cascade (QC) laser-based optical spectroscopy system for a field trial at Glasgow Airport. The walk-through portal system allows rapid detection of homemade explosives and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in real-time via analysis of air samples, without using ionizing radiation or capturing passenger images. Jean-Paul Jainsky, chairman and CEO of Morpho, said,
"We are very pleased with this partnership and to have now reached trial stage with a major airport operator such as BAA. The combination of Cascade Technologies' expertise with our leading detection technologies, through our subsidiary Morpho Detection, will contribute to our cutting-edge range of airport control security solutions."
Richard Cooper, operations director of Cascade Technologies, says the detection ability of the
new QC laser-based optical absorption spectroscopy platform is extremely sensitive. “We are talking about instrument sensitivity in sub parts per billion,” he comments. “To put it into perspective, imagine detecting a single drop of contaminated water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.”
The technology would aid throughput by dramatically speeding up the screening of airport passengers. According to Erwan Normand, chief scientific officer at Cascade Technologies, QC-based systems have the capacity to screen one person per second, giving almost instantaneous results, and could be deployed in a portal or multi-portal configuration screening up to 100 per cent of passengers at walking speed.
The technology works by using an infrared (IR) laser light from a QC laser unit to seek out the chemical fingerprint of specific molecules in gas phase, such as for example those that are linked to IEDs. “It works like a sniffer dog,” explains Normand. “All solid or liquid substances have a tendency to evaporate to a gaseous form.” The QC laser uses nano-sized crystals to harness the power of a laser source spanning the full spectrum of the technologically significant mid-IR wavelengths (3-25 μm). This important spectral region is where the majority of chemical fingerprints or absorption features lie. These absorption features allow unambiguous identification fingerprinting results from rotational vibrational transitions of atoms within the molecules. The benefit of highresolution spectroscopy coupled to the QC laser wavelength selectivity is that it can significantly decrease false-positive detection results.
More technical information on QC lasers can be found here.
YANGAROO Inc. announced that it has been granted a patent number titled "Biometric Rights Management System" by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. The Biometric Rights Management (BRM) patent relates to YANGAROO's use of biometric security measures to provide secure online distribution of digital media. The BRM patent will be in effect until June 2021.
"The receipt of this fourth patent grant is further confirmation that we continue to lead through innovation," said Cliff Hunt, Chairman and COO of YANGAROO. "As more and more valuable media assets are made available online, the need to control and monitor the users accessing that media continues to grow. The utilization of BRM in our Digital Media Distribution System provides a secure, user-friendly and portable way to link media access rights to an individual through their unique traits, rather than to a machine or an easily shared password. This feature provides our customers with the most advanced solution available today."
The Dutch Biometric passport contains a chip with the biometric details of the holder of the passport. The chip must mitigate passport fraud.
But according to the Scientific Council for Government Policy (Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid).it is not clear whether the production process that makes the chip is sufficiently fraud resistant. Also, the enrollment phase is done by insufficiently trained personnel.The report is written by the Dutch Biometrics expert Max Snijder. He says: “No one can guarantee that no bad, blurry images of fingerprints are made. People can also alter their fingertips by using sandpaper or olive oil without being noticed. " Snijder concludes that urgent measures must be taken to mitigate possible fraud.
Download the whole (146 page) report, free of charge here. The report is only available in Dutch.
Research and Markets announced the addition of Frost & Sullivan's new report "3D Vision Sensors and Image Processing. This research service provides an overview of the latest innovations in 3D vision sensors and image processing algorithms and profiles those market leaders who have overcome existing the business challenges. The perspectives and expertise of several industry leaders in the development and manufacture of 3D vision sensors using techniques such as stereovision, laser triangulation and time of flight imaging for the industrial automation, consumer electronics and gaming, biometrics, automotive safety and defense sectors have been considered for the analysis in the research service.
The dramatic rise of financial fraud has become a scary trend in today's world. According to recent studies, approximately 9.2 million Americans suffered from identity theft crimes in 2004, costing consumers $5 billion, and banks and corporations $48 billion. The growth of these crimes has resulted in a renewed interest in advanced security means.
Dr. Tatiana Vazioulina with Parascript, a company that employs patented digital image analysis and pattern recognition technologies to extract meaningful information from images, make the case for biometric signature verification. "Signature characteristics are absolutely unique to an individual and virtually impossible to duplicate. Therefore, handwriting still remains one of the most powerful human identifiers today. In dynamic signature verification, multiple biometric characteristics of a signature in question are scrutinized and compared against a reference signature kept on file to make a conclusion that measures the confidence of the signature's genuineness.
If several genuine reference signatures are available, the measure of the stability of the particular feature is developed and used to estimate the probability of deviations observed in the questionable signature."
Security industry professionals want biometrics, especially iris recognition, tools as the ultimate identity authentication method to make air travel more secure and pre-empt potential threats of terrorist action.
AOptix Technologies, Inc., suggests the use of iris recognition to authenticate passengers and secure air travel. AOptix offers a solution that they say will reduce wait time and help relax the anxiety associated with the security screening process. "The traveling public is telling us that they would prefer a quick, accurate, and non-invasive biometric authentication process as an alternative to full body scans or pat-downs," says Joseph Pritikin, Director of Product Marketing at AOptix.
"By securely processing registered travelers with minimal effort, our hope is that the TSA can spend more time on passengers who are unknown, and thereby pose a greater threat." The AOptix InSight iris recognition system is fast, effortless, and highly accurate. Operating at a distance of 2 meters, the InSight can capture a very high quality picture of an iris in less than 2 seconds. Travelers of all heights simply sit or stand in the large .75 cubic meter capture zone, look at the device, and open their eyes. With InSight, ease-of-use comes with no compromises: Iris recognition is now accepted as the most accurate of all biometric modalities.
Smartcard provider Oberthur Technologies has been selected to provide its ID-One PIV smartcard to members of Clear, Alclear's Trusted Traveler program. Clear offers members speed and predictability through airport security by collaborating with airports to provide a designated Clearlane at security checkpoints. Members present their Clearcards, manufactured by Oberthur Technologies, which feature encrypted biometrics including fingerprints and iris images. By matching their iris images or fingerprints to the information on the card, the Clear member's identity is verified.
Salmat launched a suite of speech recognition and voice biometric solutions designed for mid-market companies that want to enhance their customer service, improve operational efficiency, reinforce client privacy, and bolster overall security. Up until now, Salmat has primarily deployed speech recognition and voice biometric systems for large-scale, multi-national organizations looking to drive better customer engagement. Now, increased demand from mid-market companies has led Salmat to provide a standardized offering to organizations who want to take advantage of speech recognition and voice biometric solutions.
Ontario, Canada casinos and slots at racetracks are getting ready to introduce a facial recognition system for people who have identified themselves as gambling addicts, hoping to help them avoid difficulties. In a project that has received the sanction of the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation will install facial biometric video cameras at the entrance of all 27 of its slots rooms and casinos in 2011.
Starting next spring with the slots at its Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto, the OLG cameras will link to a system that alerts staff when someone registered with the service walks through the doors. The system makes use of an emerging technology called biometric encryption that scans a person's face. When it picks out someone who has registered with the OLG service, it alerts staff and "unlocks" information provided by the registrant.
Provincial privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian lauded the OLG facial recognition system earlier this month for making privacy integral, rather than an afterthought.
"This biometric encryption-based technology will offer dramatically improved privacy protection over simple facial recognition, without compromising any functionality, security or performance — the hallmarks of a privacy by design application," she said in a release.
In Las Vegas, a new company aims to offer its biometric identification services to the gaming industry and local financial institutions. Q, a subsidiary of Tascet, a privately held company based in Madison, Wis., will offer clients a full-service method of identifying customers using facial imaging and fingerprinting. The service also gathers and records people's genders, birth dates, birth countries, addresses and names in its database. banks, issue identification cards and financial security firms, no longer would use Social Security numbers for identification purposes when conducting business with the clients.
When customers present their cards to a bank teller for instance, the teller pushes a button and the biometric information is verified in real time through Q. The teller never sees the biometric data, but instead relies on Q to verify the customer's identity.
Tascet CEO Larry Aubol said the verification is nontransactional and that Q won't mine data. Aubol knows his business has critics, those who say he is invading their privacy by collecting fingerprints and using them to verify their identity. But he's undeterred.
"Privacy doesn't exist," Aubol said.
He explained that with the advent of search engines and companies that sell personal information, almost anyone has access to personal statistics. Aubol's idea is to limit who has access to what and rethink the way businesses verify their customers' identities.
Suprema launched X-Station, an RFID-based IP access control terminal with 3.5-inch touch screen LCD and a built-in camera for its face detection feature. X-Station offers RFID and keypad reader/controller functions with array of cutting-edge technologies. The face detection technology in X-Station provides increased level of security and effective workforce management solution. With its built-in camera, X-Station detects and captures human face images after card/PIN authorization.
This can avoid unauthorized access attempts and prevent possible payroll fraud like friend punching. The device can store up to 5,000 face image logs in its internal flash memory and it can send image logs to the server with its TCP/IP interface.
Download the X-Station brochure here.
Suprema, Inc. announced that the company's RealScan-F palm-print live scanner has been selected for the AFIS systems of the Polish National Police and Lithuania's Citizenship & Migration Affairs. Until the end of 2010, the Polish National Police (Komenda Glowna Policji) will be provided with Suprema RealScan-F palm-print live scanners for its nationwide criminal AFIS operation.
This criminal AFIS for forensic investigation requires live scanners with stringent selection criteria on the image quality and recognition performance, and the RealScan-F. Suprema also won Lithuanian Government's Citizenship and Migration Affairs project. Funded by the European Union, the project replaces legacy AFIS equipment with RealScan-F live scanners in the nation's criminal AFIS. The Lithuanian Government has a plan to develop and integrate its newly implemented AFIS with the European Union's Schengen Visa Information System (VIS) project.
The RealScan-F live scanner has been qualified for the highest standard of FBI certification (IQS Appendix F), and captures single flat/roll, two finger flats, four-finger slap, writer's edge, and palm prints.
Products from Taser shotguns to telehealth systems are helpful, but they probably will not show up in most jails anytime soon. One area that will catch on according to security experts is biometrics.
Corrections Biometric Management System (CBMS), which features iris and fingerprint biometric technology manages electronic key cabinets, secures airlock portals, keeps track of inmate property storage, monitors visitor appointments, and conducts criminal record checks. "People look at airports, what's on media stations, and managers start thinking about how they can protect society, staff, and each other in a non-intrusive manner," says one security specialist…We're going to see more biometric uses [in prisons] once people realize the return on investment."
Suprema, Inc. announced that the company's latest 'RealScan-10 UID' fingerprint live scanner tested in full compliance and received certification from the Government of India's STQC (Standardization Testing & Quality Certification) for the country's UID (Unique ID, India's next generation national ID) project. The STQC certification is an essential requirement for procurements of the U$4.4 billion UID project and ensures devices to satisfy API specifications presented by UIDAI.
The STQC provides quality assurance services in IT and electronics through its countrywide network of laboratories. Suprema's RealScan-10 UID is a compact-sized portable fingerprint live scanner, which provides range-leading capture speed and clear image quality by using the company's advanced optical image processing technology. The device performs world's fastest image scan rate of over 20 frames per second using powerful internal DSP and image processing technique.
The leaders driving smart card identity and security initiatives at the federal, state and local levels gathered at the Smart Card Alliance 9th Annual Smart Cards in Government Conference in Washington, D.C. last week.
The group shared status updates and lessons learned for projects that are underway, and roadmaps and visions for new initiatives. Three topics dominated the three-day event: the emerging National Strategy for Trusted Identity in Cyberspace (NSTIC), putting Personal Identity Verification (PIV) credentials to work for physical and logical access and identity management in healthcare.
U.S. (DHS) Deputy Secretary Jane Holl Lute and Dutch Security and Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten signed an agreement Preventing and Combating Serious Crime (PCSC)
Ivo Opstelten
The accord allows for the trade of biometric and biographic data between the United States and the Netherlands. This will strengthen counterterrorism and law enforcement efforts while protecting individual privacy.
"Faced with ever-evolving transnational threats, it is critical that we enable law enforcement officers in the United States and the Netherlands to more quickly and efficiently investigate crime and prevent criminals and terrorists from entering our respective countries," said Deputy Secretary Lute. "This agreement will strengthen our international efforts to combat transnational crime while facilitating lawful trade and travel between our two nations."
Close circuit television (CCTV) cameras will be installed and biometric records of newborn babies will be digitised at the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation-run Yashwantrao Chavan Memorial (YCM) hospital shortly to prevent newborn babies from getting stolen.
Speaking to TOI on Tuesday, Anand Jagdale, medical superintendent, YCM hospital, said, "CCTV cameras will be installed at the hospital in 10 to 12 days and digitisation of biometric records of newborn babies will also begin in a fortnight." Jagadale said that the hospital has written a letter on November 19 to the civic electricity department to install CCTV cameras at the entry and exit points of the gynaecology department, labour room, children's ward, neo-natal and paediatric intensive care units on the ground floor, new gynaecology ward 1 and 2 on fifth floor and new children's ward on fourth floor.
The FAA is proposing that all pilot certificates include photos of the certificate holder. The agency also proposed that the pilot certificates be made of plastic and contain security features, such as a hologram and an ultraviolet-sensitive layer, to prevent tampering, altering and counterfeiting.
Congress has passed a law requiring pilots to be issued biometric IDs but instead that FAA said they will add photos. Under the proposal, pilots would obtain new certificates with their photograph with a proposed expiration date of eight years. At the end of that time period, pilots would need to update their photo and obtain a new certificate.
We often hear about students fighting in campuses, but on Thursday lecturers caused a com-motion at Ramnayaran Chellaram College of Commerce on Race Course Road on the first day of evaluation work. It all began when Bangalore University (BU) officials asked the examiners to mark attendance in the biometrics system. This did not go well with the lecturers who said they did not want to give their thumb impression.
Bangalore University
When BU officials insisted, a senior lecturer said, “Why is BU insisting on thumb impressions? Don’t you people have any faith in us? We are not slaves and, hence, we are not ready for this.” BU registrar (evaluation) T R Subramanya, who was present, said, “When I go to the secretariat, even I mark my attendance in the biometrics system.
Even the United Nations (UN) secretary-general records his attendance every day in a biometrics system. This is the order of the day.”
However, the lecturers were not convinced. One of them said, “How can you compare us to UN? Are you providing the same facilities as in the UN? We cannot sit in these chairs for more than three hours and if you want me to arrive at 10 am, I have to leave home at 7 am.”
Exactly two years after terrorists sailed into Mumbai to carry out deadly attacks, several key aspects of the post-26/11 response are nowhere in sight.
Worse, ground zero, Maharashtra, seems to be the worst among coastal states in implementing many crucial components of the post-26/11 decisions. Two of the key measures decided after the terrorist strikes were bio-metric identity cards for more than four lakh fishermen along the Indian coast and transponders on all Indian fishing vessels.
Both projects are nowhere near completion. The Centre provided Rs 72 crore to a consortium led by Bharat Electronics Limited, Bangalore for data gathering and issue of biometric cards. The performance report from Maharashtra on biometric cards is embarrassing. Till date, the state has not provided biometric cards to even a single fisherman, despite several intelligence warnings of a possible repeat of the Mumbai attack and west coast being very vulnerable to terror infiltration. The state has 164,595 fishermen who are to be provided biometric cards.
The Interior Ministry of Ukraine plans to introduce electronic passports with biometric data for Ukrainians travelling abroad in the second half of 2011. Director of the State Department for Citizenship, Immigration and the Registration of Individuals Yevhen Mamonov said at a press conference in Kyiv on November 18 that such passports are necessary, as visa-free travel would be introduced soon.
According to Mamonov, during a meeting on November 17 the Cabinet of Ministers proposed profile agencies make up a list of biometric data on chips for the electronic documents for travelling abroad.
"We think that it would be reasonable to put at least fingerprints on this list. This would allow a person to be identified," he said. According to Mamonov, the first stage – the legislative introduction of the electronic documents – would not require financing.
At the second stage – the technical implementation of the plan – financing will be necessary. He also said that the new document would be similar to current pass-ports for travelling abroad. The chip with biometric data would be integrated in the back cover of the document. In addition, the chip could be augmented by new data.
IDEX® ASA today announced it will be demonstrating its award winning SmartFinger® Film fingerprint sensor integrated into One Time Password (OTP) cards at the CARTES and IDentification 2010 exhibition, located at the Parc des Expositions de Paris Nord Villepinte, Paris France, on 7/8/9/ December.
In addition, IDEX will also be demonstrating the SmartFinger® Secure Processor which is a complete embedded authentication software solution to be preinstalled on a microcontroller.
IDEX will be showing the SmartFinger® Film integrated into a biometric powered card that generates an OTP when the registered user swipes their finger over the embedded fingerprint sensor. By replacing passwords and pin codes with fingerprint authentication, restricted access can be provided in a secure and user-friendly manner. Authorized users obtain secure access simply by swiping a finger across the SmartFinger® Film sensor.
IDEX will also be showing the SmartFinger® Secure Processor (SSP), a complete embedded authentication software solution to be preinstalled on a microcontroller. The SSP interfaces the fingerprint sensor on one side and the system controller on the other. It does all the processing required to acquire fingerprint images, building and storing a small database of enrolled fingers, and match images against the database. This complete embedded biometric authentication solution provides a faster time to market for systems integrating biometric security based on SmartFinger® sensors.
Canadian authorities are investigating an "unbelievable" incident in which a passenger boarded an Air Canada flight disguised as an elderly man, according to a confidential alert obtained by CNN.
The incident occurred on October 29 on Air Canada flight AC018 to Vancouver originating in Hong Kong. An intelligence alert from the Canada Border Services Agency describes the incident as an "unbelievable case of concealment."
"Information was received from Air Canada Corporate Security regarding a possible imposter on a flight originating from Hong Kong," the alert says.
"The passenger in question was observed at the beginning of the flight to be an elderly Caucasian male who appeared to have young looking hands. During the flight the subject attended the washroom and emerged an Asian looking male that appeared to be in his early 20s."
After landing in Canada, Border Services Officers (BSOs) escorted the man off the plane where he "proceeded to make a claim for refugee protection," the alert says.
Watch the CNN Video here:
“It's human nature that we miss this sort of thing” writes Bruce Schneier about this in his book Beyond Fear
Bruce Schneier
No matter how much training they get, airport screeners routinely miss guns and knives packed in carry-on luggage. In part, that's the result of human beings having developed the evolutionary survival skill of pattern matching: the ability to pick out patterns from masses of random visual data. Is that a ripe fruit on that tree? Is that a lion stalking quietly through the grass? We are so good at this that we see patterns in anything, even if they're not really there: faces in inkblots, images in clouds, and trends in graphs of random data.
Generating false positives helped us stay alive; maybe that wasn't a lion that your ancestor saw, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
Unfortunately, that survival skill also has a failure mode. As talented as we are at detecting patterns in random data, we are equally terrible at detecting exceptions in uniform data.
The quality-control inspector at Spacely Sprockets, staring at a production line filled with identical sprockets looking for the one that is different, can't do it. The brain quickly concludes that all the sprockets are the same, so there's no point paying attention. Each new sprocket confirms the pattern. By the time an anomalous sprocket rolls off the assembly line, the brain simply doesn't notice it. This psychological problem has been identified in inspectors of all kinds; people can't remain alert to rare events, so they slip by.
Read the whole commentary from Bruce Schneier on this incident here.
Tom Marinelli, Acting CEO of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) and Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian, released a white paper today entitled Privacy-Protective Facial Recognition: Biometric Encryption Proof of Concept, announcing a major development in privacy-protective facial recognition technology.
This critical system, to be rolled out in 2011 at OLG gaming sites across the province, embeds a design protocol based on Privacy by Design, that will enable the OLG to better support its customers who have enrolled in a completely voluntary self-exclusion program, while protecting the data of all OLG customers.
Speaking today at the Toronto CIO Executive Summit, Commissioner Cavoukian said, "This collaboration is based on the application of an emerging technology called Biometric Encryption - which enables both the functionality of the system and privacy to be strongly respected."
Only when the live facial biometric of a self-excluded user is detected as present, will the system alert the OLG and "unlock" the necessary information, for security to do a manual check. No single key can unlock the complete database of enrolled persons.
The new system, developed in collaboration with Oakville, Ontario video surveillance and biometric firm iView Systems and University of Toronto researchers Professor Kostas Plataniotis (IPSI, Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering) and Dr. Karl Martin (Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering), is scheduled to be implemented by OLG in gaming sites across Ontario in 2011, starting with OLG Slots at Woodbine Racetrack.
Privacy by Design (PbD), a concept developed by Commissioner Cavoukian, prescribes that privacy be embedded directly into the design and operation, not only of various technologies, but also of business processes and networked infrastructure. Instead of treating privacy as an after-thought - "bolting it on after the fact" - PbD is proactive and preventative in nature.
Download this (20 page) Whitepaper on:
http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Resources/pbd-olg-facial-recog.pdf
New York — Today on the steps of City Hall, Councilman David G. Greenfield was joined by Council Members Gale Brewer, Fernando Cabrera, Debi Rose, Robert Jackson, Jumaane Williams, and Brad Lander in support of legislation that would ban the use of full body scanners in New York City, including New York’s two airports – JFK International Airport and LaGuardia Airport. The Council Members were also joined by privacy expert Marc Rotenberg, a professor of law at Georgetown University and President of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), who is leading a lawsuit to suspend the deployment of body scanners at US airports, pending an independent review.
Earlier this week, Councilman Greenfield proposed legislation to ban the use of full body scanners, also known as “naked body scanners,” in New York City. Passengers who pass through these scanners, which cost nearly $200,000 each, have clear images of their nude bodies displayed to a Transportation Safety Administration employee, which Homeland Security officials says make travel safer. However, leading international security experts disagree.
Israeli security experts have refused to install these scanners at Ben Gurion International Airport, which is widely hailed as the safest airport in the world. Rafi Sela, the former Chief Security Officer of the Israel Airport Authority, explained he could “overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to take down a Boeing 747.”
“The images produced by these naked body scanners are equivalent to the most intrusive strip search,” said Councilman Greenfield. “I am deeply troubled that we are subjecting New Yorkers to this humiliating process, which breaches their most basic privacy rights, when we don’t even have sufficient assurances that these scanners are more effective than other less intrusive methods.”
Watch the video here
Manchester Airport begins a 2-week trial of a system which can recognize an individual's iris while they walk around; the system might allow international transfer passengers to mix with domestic passengers in a departure lounge because they can be securely identified before boarding their flight
Manchester, U.K. Airport’s passengers will be invited to participate in the trial of a system that can recognize an individual’s iris while they walk around.
The trial of the system, which was developed by Liverpool-based Human Recognition Systems, will last for two weeks in the airport’s Terminal 1. Passengers register after check-in so that their iris can be used to identify them as they enter the security search area.
The technology could have a variety of future applications to speed up the identification of passengers.
For example, it might allow international transfer passengers to mix with domestic passengers in a departure lounge because they can be securely identified before boarding their flight. Currently, arriving passengers from overseas who are connecting to another international flight in Manchester remain separated from domestic passengers to protect the integrity of U.K. border security.
The airport already uses iris-recognition technology to manage staff access into sensitive areas of the airport. Immigration authorities also use it for pre-registered people arriving back into the United Kingdom. The current system, however, requires users to look directly into a device that uses photo-recognition software to authenticate individuals.
Face Forensics Inc, developers of f2 face recognition technology, has announced its ability to match part of a face against a database of faces. This is particularly useful in a forensics environment where only body parts are left, e.g. after an explosion or fire, or with surveillance imagery where only part of a face is available.
The image of the facial part is positioned on a generic facial template. Controls are available to resize the partial face as well as adjust the key characteristics of the generic template to the partial face. Once positioned optimally, the partial face is encoded. This encoding is then matched against the same areas of full faces in the database. Matches above a predefined threshold are displayed for an investigator to review.
F2 is specifically designed to work easily with existing databases. It will detect single or multiple faces in a photo, video, or website, and match them in real time. It is available both as a free-standing application and as an SDK, and has the capability to work with extremely large databases. An evaluation copy can be downloaded from http://www.faceforensics.com/
A leading Israeli airport security expert says the Canadian government has wasted millions of dollars to install "useless" imaging machines at airports across the country.
"I don't know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747," Rafi Sela told parliamentarians probing the state of aviation safety in Canada.
"That's why we haven't put them in our airport," Sela said, referring to Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport, which has some of the toughest security in the world.
Sela, former chief security officer of the Israel Airport Authority and a 30-year veteran in airport security and defence technology, helped design the security at Ben Gurion.
He told MPs on the House of Commons transport committee via video conference from Kfar Vradim, Israel, that he wouldn't reveal how to get past the virtual strip-search scanners, but said he can provide briefings to officials with security clearance.
Sela testified it makes more sense to create a "trusted traveller" system so pre-approved low-risk passengers can move through an expedited screening process. That would leave more resources in the screening areas, where automatic sniffing technology would detect any explosive residue on a person or their baggage.
Behavioural profiling also must be used instead of random checks, he said.
Watch the video here:
No-one understands security like the Israelis, that's why some of the world's best new innovative airport security technologies are being developed in Israel. We bring you a list of Israel's top 10 technologies.
Since the attempted terror attack on board a US airplane last Christmas day, airport authorities around the world are in a race to find novel solutions to fight terror. Israeli strategic and technical tactics feature high on their lists. What's the secret to the country's success in keeping Ben Gurion Airport terror free?
"Israel concentrates on the passengers and not their luggage so we have a real edge over the rest of the world in protecting travelers," says Rafi Sela, a top security consultant and former chief security officer at the Israel Airport Authority. "This is in addition to us protecting the whole airport, while the others merely try to achieve aviation security," he tells ISRAEL21c.
Sela, who advises governments and airport authorities all over the world, has become the leading figure advocating Israel's unique approach to airport security in the past six years.
Through his company AR Challenges, he uses approaches and technology services rooted in Israeli innovation to try to help his clients stay one-step ahead of potential terrorists. The global transportation security consultancy, of which he is president, works with high profile clients including Canada's RCMP, the US Navy Seals and airports around the world.
Making use of homegrown technologies, some of them developed by whiz-kids in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Intelligence Corps 8200 army unit, Sela believes that Israel's strength in airport security is because it boasts near-invisible protective 'rings' of security around the airport and passengers.
Most airports around the world often lack measures as basic as video surveillance, he explains. "The airports are so concentrated on finding your bottles of water and perfumes that they don't even look at you," says Sela. "The security personnel forget that they are in the business of looking for terrorists."
At Ben Gurion Airport you can take a coffee on board. According to Sela, airport security personnel don't care what you take on the plane. "The security in Israel checks you as a passenger, and not the luggage. If you are cleared as a person then who cares what you bring on the plane with you?"
Here's the list of Israel's top 10 technologies to keep our airports safe.
Unisys predicts that 2011 will likely see increased investments in biometrics-based protection of mobile devices, token-based encryption for sensitive transactions, port-worker identification systems, business continuity planning, and geographic-based security access systems.
Research into the biometrically- enabled mobile devices shows that while many consumers take proactive steps to protect themselves against cyber crime and identity theft, only slightly more than a third of Internet users in the U.S. regularly use and update passwords on their mobile devices.
Unisys expects biometrics such as voice verification or facial image to be increasingly used in 2011 to verify the identities of mobile device users.
Additionally, with 90 percent of the world's trade transported by sea and terrorist threats on the rise, U.S. port security initiatives could be accelerated in the coming year with maritime ports increasingly adopting biometric-based identity and credentialing solutions.
Download the whole (11 page) report here
In perhaps his most impassioned and irate speech to date, Congressman Ron Paul unleashed a tirade of vilification at the TSA and their security procedures that have stoked nationwide outrage, stating “enough is enough” as he introduced new legislation to that would open the way for TSA employees to be sued for groping Americans or putting them through dangerous naked body scanners, preventing travelers ‘from being treated like cattle’.
“If this doesn’t change, I see what has happened to the American people is we have accepted the notion that we should be treated like cattle. Make us safe, make us secure, put us in the barbed wire, feed us, fatten us up, and then they’ll eat us. And we are a bunch of cattle and we have to wake up and say we’ve had it….
It’s time for the American people to stand up and shrug off the shackles of our government at TSA at the airport,” he raged, encouraging people to support the national opt out day planned for November 24.
Watch the video here:
New research shows New Zealanders exercise discretion about when the use of biometrics is appropriate for proving their identity. New Zealanders rank the New Zealand Ministry of Health, New Zealand Inland Revenue and their banks as the organizations they trust the most to use biometrics such as fingerprints, voice pattern recordings and iris scans, to prove their identity when accessing services, according to new national research released today by Unisys.
Percentage of New Zealanders who said they would be prepared to use a biometric to prove their identity in the following scenarios:
• To access bank accounts – 66%
• To access health records – 58%
• To access welfare payments and information – 55%
• To access tax records or submit tax returns – 53%
• To access buildings – 45%
• To access and pay everyday bills – 36%
• To enrol in education classes – 27%
• To access public transport – 21%
• To sign up to join a club – 25%
The research, conducted as part of the latest Unisys Security Index™, , examined the willingness of New Zealanders to use biometrics to verify a person's identity in different scenarios and with various organizations. "This selective support is a sign of informed decision making by New Zealanders -- an indication that the community has come a long way since biometrics were first introduced," said Brett Hodgson, Managing Director, Unisys New Zealand.
Xyntek, Inc announced the consolidation of its Biometrics offering into its suite of XyNexus" Healthcare Integration Services. The Biometrics solution will facilitate staff user authentication and patient identification across numerous computer-based systems and applications within the hospital IT environment.
The solution includes integration with numerous readily available biometric sensor technologies. Palm-vein readers, fingerprint and/or iris scans may be utilized for system access. Xyntek's Biometric solution provides rapid and convenient log-on to all software applications in the hospital or eligible professional environment. The Xyntek solution also provides an "out of the box" addition of biometrics log-on to installations where SSO (single sign-on) software is in place in a hospital setting. Additional authorization, certification, and e-signatures within individual applications can be developed with Xyntek's integration services.
Xyntek's Biometrics XyNexus™ Healthcare Integration Service offers medical staff easy access to IT resources -- specific to their authorization level -- while eliminating costly password support. Administrative fines and penalties associated with unauthorized access to confidential patient information are virtually eliminated. Providers are able to gain access to diagnostic and medication/treatment information through integration with a variety of other technology systems.
A technology that has been on a progressively accelerating price/performance curve is face recognition technology. A series of talks this year demonstrated just how quickly the software is improving, suggests this article. The state of the art can be illustrated by some of the examples given by the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in their presentation at the Biometrics event in London.
· A search for one photograph in a database of 1.6 million takes less than one second (and the speed of such a search continues to improve).
· The false non-match rate (in other words, what proportion of searches return the wrong picture) best performance is accelerating: in 2002 it was 20 per cent, by 2006 it was 3 per cent and by 2010 it had fallen to 0.3 per cent.
· One problem that no one seems to have an answer for yet is that results seem to degrade by the log of population size (so that a 10 times bigger database delivers only twice the miss rate).
You can see that we are heading into some new territory. Even entry-level consumer software such as Picasa or iPhoto has this stuff built in to it.
The combination of the DocuSign's e-signing process employing authentication and biometrics from Authentify was introduced June 30, 2010. First customers went live in late July and more than 35,000 documents have been protected and signed since introduction.
John Zurawski, vice president at Chicago-based Authentify, noted that the security strength and audit trail are attractive features of the service. "On the surface, it's as easy as answering any phone call.
Behind the scenes, the call is synchronized to the Web interface while a voice recording and a voice biometric are captured. The voice technology creates a positive link to the person signing the documents. The audit trail is undeniable.
“The application lets me drop documents into a secure envelope and indicate that the recipient must be able to answer the phone number I trust for them to open that envelope,” said Neumann. “If you can’t answer the phone, you can’t open the documents. It makes you wonder why no one tied these things together before.”
The Security Industry Association (SIA) has released a set of recommendations for adding a biometric component to the federal E-Verify program. E-Verify allows employers to use Social Security numbers to confirm that job applicants are legal residents of the United States and can lawfully work for them.
The program, though, is subject to significant error rates and is unable to detect fraud and identity theft. SIA, on Sept. 16, released a statement asserting that the use of biometrics in the program "can reduce these error rates, increase privacy and enhance identity assurance." The recommendations paper follows up on that statement with seven specific guidelines for implementing a biometrics program in E-Verify in a way that will "protect individual privacy and prevent identity theft.
- Use biometrics to bind an individual to a credential associated with an identity based on presented biometric data and identity documents, which will be associated with a vetted Social Security Number
- Use biometric authentication of the applicant, post-enrollment, with each subsequent verification of application for employment.
- Avoid unnecessary distribution of biometric data by encoding biometric data to a smart card for possession by the person associated with the data.
- Allow solutions including a 1-to-1 match- with the smart card as a ‘personal vault,’ where an encrypted fingerprint or template is securely stored.
- E-Verify-sanctioned functions must include controlled distribution of biometric terminals to enable reporting of lost or stolen cards at easily accessible locations (such as the local U.S. Post Office).
- Biometric data collected at initial enrollment must be stored in an encrypted database.
- Utilize the experience and application expertise of industry and, in particular, the SIA
Pilots want the U.S. government to implement a program under which their identities will be confirmed using biometrics so they can pass quickly through airport security checkpoints and avoid -- for the most part -- controversial screening procedures involving body scanners or pat-downs.
Pilots unions have entered into what are described as "high-level" and "sensitive" talks with President Obama's administration officials in recent days in response to a public backlash against the use of the whole-body imaging machines and physical pat-downs that are seen as being too invasive. Beyond pilots, passenger-rights groups and privacy advocates are also criticizing the screening procedures, with some calling for a boycott of whole-body imaging machines next Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving.
John Pistole
Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole told a Senate hearing on Tuesday that he is aware of the protests but urged passengers to view security as a partnership. "Those security officers are there to work with you to make sure that everybody on that flight has been properly screened," he said.
What started as a self-proclaimed act of civil disobedience over the government's new aviation security screening procedures has turned a local 23-year-old into a celebrity on the Internet. And it got Matt Kernan through international security at the local airport without any screening whatsoever.
When returning Sunday from a business trip to Europe, Kernan refused to go through either the body-scanning machines or the alternate pat-down at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. Returning international passengers must be re-screened at CVG after clearing customs and before entering the main concourses.
Recently imposed rules from the Transportation Security Administration require all passengers entering so-called "sterile" areas such as concourses be screened either with a body-scanner or a metal detector and an additional pat-down by hand that can include touching of genitals.
"It was civil disobedience, and a big component of it was that I had the luxury to do what others have not been able to do," said Kernan, who lives downtown and says he works in finance for a local company. "I wanted to set a precedent ... and to prove the point that these new security procedures are not necessary and are invasive."
• Kernan blog about his experiences
• Kernan audio blog of his encounter
• Blog: TSA sets up complaint number
• Video/Blog: "Don't touch my junk"
• DHS travel index
• TSA website for passengers with special medication or disability issues
It's the day ordinary citizens stand up for their rights, stand up for liberty, and protest the federal government's desire to virtually strip us naked or submit to an "enhanced pat down" that touches people's breasts and genitals. You should never have to explain to your children, "Remember that no stranger can touch or see your private area, unless it's a government employee, then it's OK."
The goal of National Opt Out Day is to send a message to our lawmakers that we demand change. No naked body scanners, no government-approved groping. We have a right to privacy and buying a plane ticket should not mean that we're guilty until proven innocent. This day is needed because many people do not understand what they consent to when choosing to fly.
How? By saying "I opt out" when told to go through the bodying imaging machines and submitting to a pat down. Also, be sure to have your pat down by TSA in full public - do not go to the back room when asked. Every citizen must see for themselves how the government treats law-abiding citizens.
It's the day ordinary citizens stand up for their rights, stand up for liberty, and protest the federal government's desire to virtually strip us naked or submit to an "enhanced pat down" that touches people's breasts and genitals. You should never have to explain to your children, "Remember that no stranger can touch or see your private area, unless it's a government employee, then it's OK."
The goal of National Opt Out Day is to send a message to our lawmakers that we demand change. No naked body scanners, no government-approved groping. We have a right to privacy and buying a plane ticket should not mean that we're guilty until proven innocent. This day is needed because many people do not understand what they consent to when choosing to fly.
How? By saying "I opt out" when told to go through the bodying imaging machines and submitting to a pat down. Also, be sure to have your pat down by TSA in full public - do not go to the back room when asked. Every citizen must see for themselves how the government treats law-abiding citizens.
Both public and private sectors worldwide are witnessing rapid adoption of biometrics as an accurate, reliable and cost-saving way for better and advanced security surveillance. Over the years, the biometric technology has developed from a new technology used in a narrow band of closed environment applications to a useful, practical, fit-for-purpose tool used across a wide range of industries and in a variety of applications.
Increasing security concerns - ranging from individual identity theft and corporate security to national security - are driving the biometric market. According to our new research report “Global Biometric Forecast to 2012”, the global biometric market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of around 22% between 2011 and 2013. Besides, our research discusses about the current and future scenario of the biometric market in various regions, underlining the future potential areas and key issues crucial for the market development.
At the regional level, North America dominates the global biometric market and is expected to account for a market share of over 30% in 2010. The Asian, Middle East and Africa region are also expected to emerge as growing markets for biometrics by 2013. In fact, the Gulf and African countries have already taken several initiatives and started various biometric programs.
The report has also found that the government sector accounts for the major share of the biometrics market whereas the healthcare and financial sectors emerging as the potential adopters of biometrics systems. Many banks in developing countries (specifically Asian nations, including India, China, Malaysia, etc.) are adopting biometrics to curb fraud and offer customers an easy and more convenient authentication alternative to cards and PINs for transactions like ATM withdrawals.
An electronic version of this report can be downloaded here for € 1.147,-
[NOTE: This was a *long* time ago, and has since been removed - I looked the next time I flew through IND. Also, I have no problem with the TSA. I may hate taking my shoes off, but I've always been treated professionally when I've flown. I just happened to find this one particular incident unnerving.]
As I was walking to baggage claim at IND, I passed by the TSA booth near security check-in. I was surprised to see what was the desktop/background image on this TSA computer: It is a cover for a fake children's book called "My First Cavity Search".
You can see a bigger version of the cover here: i26.tinypic.com/1zpkwle.jpg
But seriously TSA - not cool.
Comment: This is a Flickr post, so I don’t know if this is a real picture. Nevertheless, it gives an expression of the feelings of the people that are really angry about the ‘new normal’. The picture of the desktop is some 2 years old . This post is going viral.
Morpho's technology played a key role in the issuance of the first 12-digit UIDAI number during the inauguration ceremony for the Aadhaar project by the Indian Prime Minister. This marks the official launch of the world's largest biometrics-based identity project and a major leap for India's development. Morpho (Safran group) has been at the forefront of this effort as the biometrics technology provider for de-duplication of the very first numbers.
The program is designed to provide a secure identity to all Indian residents, based on the latest generation biometric technologies (fingerprint and iris recognition).
As part of this project each Indian resident will be assigned a unique identification number. This number will not only enable secure access to benefits and services (education, telecom, medical care, banking and financial services), but also unprecedented political and economic rights for the residents of India.
Currently among the project’s three successful bidders, selected following an extensive qualification process, Mahindra Satyam / Morpho is the only Indian company-led consortium that has already de-duplicated thousands of biometric records at the UIDAI centre in Bangalore, using Morpho’s technology.
At Baltimore-Washington International airport, I told the officer who directed me to the back-scatter that I preferred a pat-down. I did this in order to see how effective the manual search would be. When I made this request, a number of TSA officers, to my surprise, began laughing. I asked why.
One of them -- the one who would eventually conduct my pat-down -- said that the rules were changing shortly, and that I would soon understand why the back-scatter was preferable to the manual search. I asked him if the new guidelines included a cavity search. "No way. You think Congress would allow that?"
I asked him if he was looking forward to conducting the full-on pat-downs. "Nobody's going to do it," he said, "once they find out that we're going to do."
In other words, people, when faced with a choice, will inevitably choose the Dick-Measuring Device over molestation? "That's what we're hoping for. We're trying to get everyone into the machine." He called over a colleague. "Tell him what you call the back-scatter," he said. "The Dick-Measuring Device," I said. "That's the truth," the other officer responded.
Everyone has a unique pattern of eye movements. A new biometric security system exploits this for a simple, hard-to-fool approach. A company in Israel has developed a security system that does just this -- exploiting a person's unique pattern of eye movements to identify them.
Most biometric security systems measure physical features that are constant, such as fingerprints or iris patterns. An eye-tracking system has the potential to be harder to fool and easier use, its creators say. The new system tracks the way a person's eye moves as he watches an icon roam around a computer screen.
The way the icon moves can be different every time, but the user's eye movements include "kinetic features" -- slight variations in trajectory -- that are unique, making it possible to identify him. This is less complicated than using a long pass phrase or a smart card to gain access to a computer system or a building.
"The interface is really very simple," says Daphna Palti-Wasserman, CEO of ID-U Biometrics, the company that developed the technology. "The user watches a target moving on a screen and a camera monitors their eye movement responses."
Eye tracking also requires no specialist hardware, other than a camera and a display, so it is cheaper and easier to deploy, Palti-Wasserman says. Using a standard video camera, the system can identify users with an accuracy of 97 percent, she says. Many cell phones and laptops already have this kind of hardware, so ID-U's system could be deployed widely for both desktop and mobile computing. The company is currently working on an app for the iPhone 4.
Wacom® Technology Corporation introduced its STU family of signature tablets in the Americas to meet the technology needs of companies that are moving toward paperless transactions and a digital. Wacom's signature tablet series feature Wacom's pressure-sensitive, battery-free and cordless pen technology to capture clear, true-to-life signatures. Additionally, by way of its advanced electro-magnetic resonance technology, Wacom's signature tablets are able to capture the static and biometric signals of individual signatures, making forgery extremely difficult. Wacom's signature tablet lineup consists of three tablets; designed to capture an electronic signature, replacing the need for a signature on paper.
More information can be found here.
Logging into your favorite web services could soon be as easy as speaking and looking at your phone. Voice recognition and Face technology has been developed that could do away with having to type in passwords. At the University of Manchester, UK a team has developed a demo app that can log the user into Gmail, Twitter and Facebook using just voice and face recognition.
Work on the technology finishes this month and Dr. Philip A. Tresadern says that a number of well-known companies in the mobile space have shown interest in using the technology.
Although the demo has been built for the Nokia N900, Dr Tresadern says that he may well have opted for the iPhone if the front-facing camera-sporting iPhone 4 had been released in time.
Forget Apple’s Facetime, this seems like the perfect use for a front-facing camera. If your smartphone is stolen, the thief potentially has access to not only any photos, video and music stored on it, but also your email, Twitter account and other social media profiles. Protecting all of that with something more secure than a password makes sense, and this technology could well be the solution. Dr Tresadern says that it won’t be fooled by a photograph of your face, either. “We can easily make it check for movements like the eys blinking”. It also has potential as a way of integrating XBox Kinect-style features into mobile phone games.
Watch the video here:
The Australian Immigration Department has confirmed that biometrics requirements will be extended to include most types of offshore visa applications, including student visas. The biometric screening process has been described as a discreet, non-intrusive examination that captures a digital facial image and 10-digit fingerprint scan.
The move has raised concerns, with overseas student educators calling for it to be handled sensitively. The Australian Immigration Department confirmed that biometrics would be extended from detainees and asylum-seekers to most types of offshore visa applications, including student visas. The first stage of the trial will be applied at two locations. It then will be extended to missions across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East in line with procedures already operating in Britain, the U.S., Japan and parts of the Middle East.
People applying for English-language and schools-sector visas as well as for vocational education, higher education, postgraduate research and AusAID visas will be among those subjected to biometric scanning, an Immigration Department fact sheet says.
Another Australian biometric use centers on Essendon's Personal Risk Management Group, a leading pre-employment screening organization, is marketing biometric technology to state and federal government departments and corporate organizations, including the mining industry. Founder and managing director Geoff Stockton said biometric technology was already all around us.
"Voice-recognition software exists on telephone systems, our airports are fitted with SmartGate systems and we have Intel Scanners to check the legitimacy of licenses and passports," Stockton said.
"What we're doing is combining our software with the existing technology for a much broader and greater offering." PRM, joining forces with Spanish-based Avalon Biometrics, hopes to introduce face and iris recognition technology to the mining industry and digital fingerprinting for the banking and education sector.
Pulse Phone is a heart rate monitor that gathers pulse data by using your iPhone's camera. As you lightly place your finger over the camera lens, the app registers subtle changes in the color and brightness of the image -- looking through your finger to monitor the blood as it pulses through your digits. This is made easier with the iPhone 4's built-in camera flash -- although older models will work (as will the newest iPod touch), provided that you are in a very well lit room.
In the beginning, Apple refused to approve the app -- but it had nothing do with its status as a biometric analyzer. "We originally developed the app over a year and a half ago, but we had to hack into Apple's code for the camera," Lozano-Hemmer says. "So we were rejected."
Since then, though, Apple loosened its restrictions and began allowing developers to dig in to the camera's coding. One Lozano-Hemmer and his team had unfettered access to the camera, they were able to develop their own algorithm that analyzes the user's pulse based on changes in the image's brightness and color.
We've seen heart rate apps before. Many of them rely on sound, much like stethoscopes, and haven't seen much success (Lozano-Hemmer is aghast that they would ask the user to put their pricey phone "right up to your sweaty chest"), while others require separate hardware.
Lozano-Hemmer notes that there are other camera-based pulse apps on the market, but Pulse Phone allows the user to choose between quick readings and more accurate ones. ("We also think our image analysis is sturdier," he says.) For an app this simple, though, the results seem accurate enough to warrant the $1.99 price tag.
DigitalPersona, Inc. announced that Michigan State University Federal Credit Union (MSUFCU) has deployed DigitalPersona® Pro software and U.are.U® Fingerprint Readers. MSUFCU has more than 300 employees who access over 60 applications to handle everything from transactions with the Federal Reserve or American Express to inputting daily timecards.
Given the high access security requirements of these applications, employees must change each application's password every 90 days. The DigitalPersona solution eliminates the need for employees to remember and manually type separate strong passwords to more than 60 applications. DigitalPersona Pro uses fingerprint biometrics to verify the user's identity, and then securely and automatically enters the appropriate password needed for each application.
Eliminating application passwords is a primary objective of every IT department. Managing application passwords is a burden of every employee that the IT department serves. Authasas® Authentication at your Service announced the release of Authasas Advanced Authentication® for Novell® SecureLogin. This solution integrates market-leading authentication technology with the market leading enterprise single sign-on technology. Authasas Advanced Authentication® secures single sign-on credentials with several available strong authentication methods including fingerprint biometrics, contactless smart cards, and USB Flash drive token authenticators.
Doing both securely is the objective behind integrating Authasas Advanced Authentication® with Novell® SecureLogin. The resulting integration provides both replacement of the Windows® logon password with a stronger, multi-factor authentication method, and it provides re-authentication to secure applications that are SSO-enabled via SecureLogin.
China PharmaHub Corp. announced it has signed an agreement to be a distributor for Integrated Biometrics ("IB"), a provider of high performance fingerprint biometric identity solutions. PharmaHub will have the exclusive distribution rights in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau to sell IB products to customers in the Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology, Healthcare, Lock Manufacturing and Safe Manufacturing industries. Additionally, PharmaHub will have the non-exclusive right to sell such products to other industries in the Greater China Region. IB develops and manufactures fingerprint-based biometric identification systems and physical access control solutions
Precise Biometrics released a fingerprint reader for embedded, secure handling of fingerprint extraction and verification -- the Precise 250 PIV. The combined fingerprint and smart card reader embeds ANSI 378 technology and builds on the top-ranking fingerprint extractor in the US interoperability program Ongoing MINEX. The readers are made in the U.S. and available the first quarter of 2011.
Precise Biometrics' fingerprint extractors are top-ranked in the interoperability program Ongoing MINEX, organized by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST. This technology has now been embedded in the Precise 200 series fingerprint readers - the world's most deployed combined fingerprint and smart card readers.
Lumidigm announced that the research firm Frost & Sullivan has found Lumidigm to be at the top of its class in fingerprint-biometrics product innovations. Frost & Sullivan has recognized that Lumidigm's more effective solution, based on using multiple spectrums of light and advanced polarization techniques to extract unique fingerprint characteristics from both the surface and subsurface of the skin, provides results that are more consistent, more inclusive and more tamper resistant.
"Lumidigm's sensors do more to meet performance requirements than the fingerprint sensors of any other vendor surveyed," relates Raman Monga, industry manager for Frost & Sullivan's electronics group. "Since they are small, light and compatible, possessing multiple communication interfaces, Lumidigm biometric sensors can be easily integrated into any existing system. The return-on-investment (ROI) of Lumidigm sensors is much higher than that of traditional biometric sensors."
"For many years now, the promise of biometrics has not been fully realized in large part because conventional biometric technologies rely on unobstructed and complete contact between the fingerprint and the sensor, a condition that is elusive in a world that is wet, dry, or dirty and where users are not all young office workers with great skin who are experienced at using biometrics," emphasizes Phil Scarfo, Lumidigm senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing.
"Frost & Sullivan has recognized that Lumidigm's more effective solution, based on using multiple spectrums of light and advanced polarization techniques to extract unique fingerprint characteristics from both the surface and subsurface of the skin, provides results that are more consistent, more inclusive and more tamper resistant."
To more fully understand the significance of this technology’s subsurface imaging capability, it may help to examine the nature of how a human fingerprint is created. The fingerprint ridges that we see on the surface of the finger have their foundation beneath the surface of the skin, in the capillary beds and other sub-dermal structures. The fingerprint ridges we see on our fingertips are merely an echo of the foundational “inner fingerprint”.
Unlike the surface fingerprint characteristics that can be obscured by moisture, dirt or wear, the “inner fingerprint” lies undisturbed and unaltered beneath the surface. When surface fingerprint information is combined with subsurface fingerprint information and reassembled in an intelligent and integrated manner, the results are more consistent, more inclusive and more tamper resistant.
Multispectral Fingerprint Image Acquisition (1.2 MB)
This (20 page) whitepaper discusses biometric multispectral imaging technology in depth.
Plantiga Technologies Inc., a privately-held Vancouver, BC, based company, which is now in the pre-commercialization phase of its company's development, today announced the formal completion of its international patent registration. Plantiga has developed a biometric technology measuring gait, posture and movement, which will provide the highest level of security for uses in Homeland Security, air, sea and other port protection, major community utilities (water, electricity, gas, nuclear, etc.), pharmaceutical research facilities, Armed Forces, and other facilities requiring 100% security integrity.
"Our technology consolidates data from a person's gait, posture and movement and collects that data in a central security system - wherever the person is in the secured facility," said Quin Sandler, CEO of Plantiga. "1GRID (R) is a security network which continually monitors and audits against preset rules in the system. Our biometric data is as accurate as matching DNA... but we do it non-intrusively!"
Thumb scanners for mobile phone security are a while off, according to Telstra's chief technology officer Dr Hugh Bradlow, who said that his security team managed to best a "Russian mafia-proof" scanner in just one day.
Speaking at a CEDA CIO event in Sydney this afternoon, Bradlow repeated his belief that it was just a matter of years before people replace their keys and cards with mobile phones using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, such as that already in use by companies like Visa and Mastercard.
When he was questioned as to whether this would have security implications if someone's phone was stolen, Bradlow said research showed that people in general were more aware of their phone than their keys and wallet. Such awareness could be of more use than other protective measures, according to Bradlow.
Hugh Bradlow
"We a few years ago got one of these thumbprint recognition things that was supposed to be Russian mafia-proof. In other words, if they cut your thumb off and put it on the device, it was supposed to not respond because it required a live thumb with blood flowing through it," he said.
"Now my guys defeated that in one day with $2 worth of equipment they bought at Coles. They lifted a fingerprint from glass, got a piece of gelatin, transposed the fingerprint onto the gelatin, and put the gelatin on their thumb ... and it worked," he added. "So would you rely on that for your banking? No. You might rely on it to open your email or something less precious to you."
"You're still going to have multi-factor authentication for things that are important."
Bradlow said he was less concerned about potential privacy or security breaches through the increased use of RFID technology than he was about the information people handed over willingly to social-networking websites.
On a planet hosting 6.7 billion human beings, having proof you’re unique is of tantamount importance. The ear, it turns out, may be the best identification yet. Through a new shapefinding algorithm called “image ray transform,” which boasts 99.6 percent accuracy, according to a study presented at the IEEE Fourth International Conference on Biometrics Sept. 29, the outer ear may prove to be one of the most accurate and least intrusive ways to identify people. Fingerprint databases of U.S. government agencies alone store the records of more than 100 million people, but prints can rub off or callous over during hard or repetitive labor. With the advent of computer vision, researchers and identification industries are seeking easier and more robust biometrics to get their hands on.
“When you’re born your ear is fully formed. The lobe descends a little, but overall it stays the same. It’s a great way to identify people,” said Mark Nixon, a computer scientist at the University of Southampton. and leader of the research. “There’s real power in using the appearance of an ear for computer recognition, compared to facial recognition. It’s roughly equivalent if not better,” said computer scientist Kevin Bowyer of Notre Dame, who is pursuing his own ear-recognition technology and not involved with Nixon’s work. “If you’ve got a profile image for someone, this is a great way to use it.”
Plans by the South Australian Government to roll out biometrics at a number of prisons across the state have been delayed due to required construction work. Plans for the trial were announced in May. Pending a successful trial, it will be rolled out to sites including Yatala Labour Prison, Adelaide Women’s Prison, Mobilong Prison , Port Augusta Prison, Mt Gambier Prison, Cadell Training Centre, and Port Lincoln Prison.
A Department for Correctional Services (DCS) spokesperson said that in order to house the new equipment, the Adelaide facility requires some building work to be undertaken.
JEDDAH: Citizens and residents will now be able to get exit/re-entry visas for their dependents through their mobile phones via SMS. The service, which costs SR20 per visa after initial registration, is aimed at reducing lines at Passport Department offices. Raid Mohammad Al-Hussain, spokesperson for the Passport Department in Makkah province, confirmed that the new service is already in operation with all three of the country's mobile phone service providers — STC, Mobily and Zain. The visa can be downloaded from the site http://sms.evisa.com.sa with the visa number and confirmation number sent via SMS.
The first step is to register with the service, called Ishaar, to obtain an access code. This process requires the registration form to be submitted in person to a nearby registration center with copies of relevant identifications. Saudi citizens with foreign employees, such as maids or drivers, can use the service as well.
The administration’s strategy for identity management is expected to be finalized this winter. It is an effort to bring some order to the task of managing identities and personal information in an increasingly online world. It is a worthwhile goal, but its success will depend on the ability of the private sector to provide effective, user-friendly tools to implement it and then convince the public to use it.
The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace has been under development for about a year as the result of the president’s Cyberspace Policy Review. One of the review’s recommendations was the “the federal government — in collaboration with industry and the civil liberties and privacy communities —should build a cybersecurity- based identity management vision and strategy for the nation that considers an array of approaches, including privacy-enhancing technologies.” A draft was released in June, and the final document is expected this winter.
Download the draft version of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace here
This report from Vincent Böhre on the new Dutch Biometric passport is an extensive study commissioned by the Scientific Council for Government Policy, specifically the Policy Project, and Information Technology (BIT).
All aspects of the introduction of a new biometric passport were extensively researched. These aspects were issues on privacy, identity, transparency, accountability, choice, effectiveness and efficiency, also with respect to the associated responsibilities of the Dutch government.
A must read for any Biometrics professional.
This 158 page report (only available in Dutch) can be downloaded (for free) here.
An interview with the author of this study, Vincent Böhre, can be found here.
There has been a lot of talk recently in the security community about high speed GPU (video card) processors being able to crack passwords very quickly.
But there is a technology that can crack them even faster. A Swiss security company called Objectif Sécurité has created a cracking technology that uses rainbow tables on SSD drives.
Passwords like 72@Fee4S@mura! took only 5 seconds to crack. What about this one: T&p/E$v-O6,1@}. Cracked in 11 seconds. In fact these passwords are so complex they can’t be used in everyday use, because you can’t remember them.
Many companies and government facilities are moving away from using just passwords to dual authentication methods. Biometrics and smartcards are really becoming popular in secure facilities.
Iscon is introducing an enhanced version of the 1000D whole body scanner equipped with optional biometric technologies and identity verification techniques that will vastly improve security at corrections facilities, law enforcement as well as international airports.
The Iscon 1000D is the only whole body imaging portal that can be integrated with state of the art technologies to detect virtually any object, without radiation or privacy issues and confirm that the person is indeed who they claim to be. This is critical in prisons as inmates try to pose as others to escape as well as airport security to speed processing, identify terrorists and discover contraband.
Iscon1000D uses thermo-conductive infrared technology that completes a 360°scan in 30 seconds, reveals a multitude of objects, but doesn't penetrate clothing, so there's no privacy or radiation issues.
It can detect the thermal imprint of any object that many scanners miss, including:
• thin plastic
• wood
• powder (pills and drugs)
• paper (money)
• liquids
• ceramics (explosives)
Iscon 1000D is already been sold in the U.S., Europe, China, Japan, Iraq, Russia and the Ukraine.
The enhanced system offers stand alone or combined options for integrated security capabilities through identify verification using Facial Recognition, Fingerprint Recognition and Iris Recognition
The Iscon 1000D is equipped with a card and barcode reader. At manufacturing facilities and other high security operations, that require both scanning and verification, this system is ideal for people who are preapproved and can simply scan their card or barcode and go through safely.
Watch the demonstration video here
Neurotechnology, a provider of high-precision biometric identification technologies, announced the release of MegaMatcher Accelerator 3.0, a packaged multi-biometric software and hardware solution for high-volume, high-speed fingerprint and iris identification. This latest version of MegaMatcher Accelerator includes very fast iris matching capabilities of up to 200 million irises per second, with increased fingerprint matching speeds of up to 100 million fingerprints per second. Either iris or fingerprint modes can be used as primary, fast-identification biometrics, or both can be used together for even more accurate multi-biometric identification.
Additionally, MegaMatcher Accelerator can check identification results with other biometric data from any Neurotechnology-supported modality, including fingerprint, iris, face or palmprint, providing the very high level of reliability required for applications such as voter duplication detection, passport issuance, border crossings or other national-scale projects.
Unlike systems that use classification or indexing schemes for matching (which can result in loss of reliability and speed), MegaMatcher Accelerator's matching technology compares every fingerprint and every iris to provide more accurate results. MegaMatcher Accelerator 3.0 can manage a database of up to 30 million fingerprints (a 10 million fingerprint increase over the previous version) with speeds that are 2.5 times faster than the 1:N (1-to-many) matching speed of the previous version, making it the fastest, high-volume fingerprint matching engine available. When iris is used, MegaMatcher Accelerator 3.0 can manage a database of up to 50 million irises. For situations where an even larger number of fingerprints or irises is required, multiple MegaMatcher Accelerators can be connected in a cluster to manage databases with billions of records. Download the brochure on MegaMatcher Accelerator here.
To protect the nation's security better, one of the State Department's top IT officials says Americans need better biometrics in the visa and passport process. Kirit Amin, chief information officer with the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, said that fingerprints are fine, but if the government really wants to do a bulletproof job of recording and verifying someone's identity, the solution is as close as the eyes on your face. "I love iris," Amin said during AFCEA Law Enforcement IT Day conference in Bethesda, Md., referring to the process by which a photograph is taken of the unique pattern of structures inside the cornea. "Iris scanning has come a long way in the last two-to-three years," he said. "It's not only very accurate, but it has a smaller footprint than facial recognition. However, it is bigger than that. It's non-intrusive."
Speed Identity has introduced Speed Capture Station G3, the 3rd generation integrated biometric data capture system for e-Passports, Visas, Driving licenses and national ID cards. The G3 is an extremely compact all-in-one solution for capturing biographic and biometric data -- signature, photo, and fingerprints in an all-digital workflow. The system integrates smoothly with the handling- and administrative systems of national authorities as well as with the production systems of the companies responsible for manufacturing Passports and other ID documents. "The G3 addresses key issues such as portability, integration, customization, maintenance and service. With the G3, we can offer a standard, modular enrolment platform to end users and partners alike, offering industry-leading performance and reliability at low and predictable costs", says Magnus Svenningson, CEO Speed Identity.
More info on the Speed Capture Station G3 can be found here
myBiodentity Corp. released a major update to bio-iVault Encrypted Virtual Drive Manager which uses myBiometrix Biometric platform to deliver Finger, Face and Voice verification to securely create and manage the encrypted virtual drives. Using Biometrics means No Passwords to remember or have stolen. The bio-iVault drives appear just like a normal drive in Explorer, so files can be created, edited, and deleted just as is done on a normal drive.
The important difference is the bio-iVault drive is virtual, and encrypts all information as it is added which means all files and data, financials, images and music, are scrambled so only the "actual" owner can access them. Each virtual drive (or Container) is like one highly secure encrypted Folder that only the authorized owner can access, and can only be seen when a valid Scan is authorized to gain access. More information can be found on the website of MyBiodentity on:
http://www.mybiodentity.com/index.asp
Morpho has confirmed its technology has played a role in the issuance of the first 12-digit UIDAI number during the rollout of the Aadhaar ID project by India's Prime Minister.
The scheme is designed to provide all Indian residents with a secure form of ID, based on the latest generation of fingerprint and iris recognition biometric technologies. Each resident is being assigned a unique identification number which will not only give them secure access to benefits and services, including education, telecoms, medical care, banking and finance, but also electoral and economic rights.
Morpho is one of the project's three successful bidders, selected following an extensive qualification process. According to the firm, the Mahindra Satyam/Morpho consortium is the only Indian-led group involved in de-duplicating thousands of biometric records at the UIDAI center in Bangalore.
One of the serious threats to a user's computer is a software program that might cause unwanted keystroke sequences to occur in order to hack someone's identity. This form of an attack is increasing, infecting enterprise and personal computers, and caused by "organized malicious botnets," said Daphne Yao, assistant professor of computer science at Virginia Tech. To combat the "spoofing attacks," Yao and her former student, Deian Stefan, now a graduate student in the computer science department at Stanford University, developed an authentication framework called "Telling Human and Bot Apart" (TUBA), a remote biometrics system based on keystroke-dynamics information. Yao holds a patent on her human-behavior driven malware detection technology, including this keystroke anti-spoofing technique.
Her technology for PC security is currently being transferred to a company. The license agreement between the company, Rutgers University (Yao's former institution), and Virginia Tech is expected to be finalized in the coming weeks.
Hein Daanen, professor at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and TNO in Soesterberg discovered that some of the Dutch adults do not match the height / width ratio of their head required for the passport photo.
He also knows how many Dutch people: 2.7 percent , more than 378 000 persons of 14 years or older.
This percentage is even higher in China (4%) and Greece (5%).
According to the rules the face height on the passport photo must be between 36 to 30 millimeters, and a face width 16 to 20 mm. The ratio of height and width is therefore between 1.3 and 1.875.
In principle, deviations are not allowed, but exceptions may be made so in practice there are no problems.-
Thanks to a new Bluetooth-enabled calorie counting system, fitness fanatics can have realtime access to calories burned, be able to log calories consumed, and develop a meal plan -- all on their mobile device. Developed by fitness club chain 24 Hour Fitness, http://www.24hourfitness.com the bodybuggSP personal calorie management system allows users to monitor their weight-loss progress in realtime. Users simply wear a high-tech armband, which measures calorie intake using a variety of biometrics such as galvanic skin response, physical activity, and temperature.
The armband's Bluetooth functionality then allows users to transfer data to compatible mobile devices, such as the iPhone and iPod touch. Using the free bodybuggSP app, users can log calories in, track calories out, and even count how many steps they have taken from the palm of their hand. Users also have access to the bodybugg.com Web interface to input and track calories consumed and assist with daily meal planning.
Organic Motion, announced the public release of its BioSTAGE" v1.0 platform, a turnkey motion tracking and analysis package for the life sciences. BioSTAGE is able to track the full range of a person's motions without the use of any markers or body suits. "BioSTAGE makes it easy to take motion analysis from the research lab, and put it directly in the hands of clinicians in numerous medical practices, including orthopedic, podiatric, and physical therapy, said Andrew Tschesnok, CEO, Organic Motion.
"By providing a platform that can generate better biometrics, we have enabled a world of exciting new applications, ranging from analyzing athletic performance to teaching the elderly how to exercise better; pre and post-surgical therapeutic analysis and hundreds more life science applications."
The Online Publishers Association, along with the Interactive Advertising Bureau, has been promoting a series of larger ad formats, like page takeovers. While the larger canvas has improved the creative quality of online ads markedly, advertisers say they will not spend more until they have verifiable proof that the ads are working. The OPA's answer: check out the latest biometric data. Essentially, biometrics looks at what is going on physically with a person, including heart rate, sweat, breathing, and motion, while they're engaged in whatever action is being studied. The goal, in this case, was to determine whether or not there was a physical reaction from a web-user when seeing an ad across their screen.
About 100 participants were directed to the homepages of three OPA member sites: CNN.com, MSNBC.com and NYTimes.com. After strapping a monitor to the participants chests and using a heat sensor to track their eye movements, the OPA and Innerscope found: 67 percent of users revisited OPA's Ad Units after spending time on a Web page, 96 percent of participants say they pay attention to OPA Ad Units while naturally surfing, and it takes about 0.6 seconds to fixate (or focus) on an OPA Ad Unit. So what does all this mean?
Pam Horan, the OPA’s president, says it all adds up to figuring out a metric for “engagement” on the part of users and advertising.
Biometric standards have to be adhered to without any compromise, says Marius Coetzee, COO, Ideco, South Africa.. As with any influential and rapidly deployed technology, biometric technology has many facets and a number of dynamics that users ought to bear in mind, says Marius Coetzee, CEO at Ideco
Biometric Security Solutions. Worldwide, Coetzee says, governments and industry groups are stepping in and mandating the use of sophisticated biometric systems in identity management solutions. He notes that there are various biometric products available on the market and even more claims from the manufacturers. However, he points out that on paper these products seem fully compliant but over time the optic sensitivity fades and image noise increases to the extent that security is compromised due to the many false acceptances.
He says physical biometric technology is used for either identification or verification and is based on the measurement of inherent physical characteristics of people such as fingerprints, iris, face, etc.
Fingerprint biometrics, he adds, is globally regarded the most mature technology with more than 64% of all applications based on it. "These biometric devices have evolved to the extent that they have now found applications for bank ATM identification, transaction authorization, and secure login."
Plans for the 5th Security Document World show are well advanced and exhibition floor is almost fully sold. Focusing on security documents, advanced border control, eVisas, ePassports, and document anti-counterfeiting. There is also a three-day conference running that runs concurrent with the exhibition.
Since its inception in 2007, the event has grown steadily and this year we anticipate attracting more than 70 exhibitors and over 1000 attendees during the 3-days of the event.
Angel Inc. has launched a closed beta of its cloud-based virtual call center management app for Apple iOS4 and Google Android devices. The Vienna, Va.-based firm, which operates as a subsidiary of business-intelligence software maker MicroStrategy Inc., said the new app is geared toward both call center supervisors and agents looking to manage their call traffic. The virtual call center app is just the first of several scheduled apps the company plans to release as part of its Angel Mobile line. Next year, Angel plans to release a mobile interactive voice response app that can be customized to meet the needs of various industry verticals. For example, Keane said the company has been working with a large pharmaceutical firm that wants to make it easier for doctors to securely order drug samples via an automated voice system.
"We've come up with an app that allows doctors to order the samples through the app and then authenticate themselves through voice biometrics," he said. "This is where mobile apps are headed." The company said the entire set of Angel Mobile branded apps will be part of its Angel 4 Customer Experience Platform, a customer engagement and communications platform the firm released in August.
Angel is a leading provider of enterprise focused, cloud based, customer engagement solutions, including Caller First focused Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Call Center solutions. These solutions enable enterprise organizations to quickly deploy voice, SMS, chat and business intelligence applications. More than 1,600 customers worldwide turn to Angel's proprietary customer engagement technology to power customer experience, marketing and sales needs. Angel's solutions are built on an on-demand, Software as a Service (SaaS) platform and require no investment in hardware, software, or human resources.
The launch of Microsoft's long-anticipated motion-sensing video game, Kinect for Xbox 360, has fueled the dispute over whether facial-recognition software discriminates against some races. GameSpot noted in a review that Kinect's facial recognition capabilities appear to fail to recognize players with dark skin.
It is by no means the first time that facial-recognition software has faced allegations of being less than fair and equal fashion. This is not the first time that face technology caused a stir. There was a ruckus over claims that HP's Web cams failed to track people with dark skin.
Watch this video here:
Here is what GameSpot had to say in its review of the Kinect: "While testing out the Kinect, two dark-skinned GameSpot employees experienced problems with the system's facial-recognition abilities. The system recognized one employee inconsistently, while it was never able to identify the other properly despite repeated calibration attempts. However, Kinect had no problems identifying a third dark-skinned GameSpot employee, recognizing his face after a single calibration. Lighter-skinned employees were also consistently picked up on the first try."
So it seems that in the digital world albino’s have the edge over ‘normal’ colored people.
It’s a strange world.
UK biometric company OmniPerception unveiled innovative light immune real-time facial recognition technology at Biometrics 2010.
CheckPoint.S" uses OmniPerception's face identification technology in a distinctive way in that it can scan a face in seconds even when the subject is moving and not directly looking into the camera.
Developed by experts at the company's UK headquarters, the technology can be used in a variety of applications including as a covert surveillance solution that can automatically scan faces and check identity, providing an alert in real-time if a match is found.
As a passenger recognition solution, it can enable security staff to better prevent the passage of registered no-fly, and "people of interest" through transit centers.
Watch the video here:
Airport security "must shift from looking for bad objects to finding terrorists -- bad people," according to an airline industry executive.
"Belts, shoes and shampoo are not the problem," Giovanni Bisignani, director general and chief executive officer of the International Air Transport Association, said at the association's annual security conference, in Frankfurt, Germany, on Tuesday. "We must combine effective information from the enormous amount of passenger data that we collect with technology that can screen for more things than just metal. This will give us a dynamic system that can deal with changing threats."
And, he added: "The process must become much quicker and more convenient. Discouraging travelers with queues into the parking lot is not a solution. And it is not acceptable to treat passengers as terrorists until they prove themselves innocent."
Giovanni Bisignani
Bisignani called for expedited procedures for "pre-identified low-risk travelers and for those who give us access to more personal history"
Short-term, airport checkpoints must match checks to risk levels using passenger data and speed up the process by reducing the need for packing and unpacking, Bisignani said.
Body scanners could be a part of this process but not for all, not without significantly faster processing time and not before carefully identifying costs, benefits and weaknesses.
At an estimated cost of $2.4 billion for their deployment in the U.S. alone, scanners are a lot of money for a still undefined return. Similarly, equipment that can detect liquids and gels will be key but only when we have robust technology. ...
My long-term vision is for the passenger to be able to get from the door of the airport to the door of the aircraft in a seamless and uninterrupted process. A biometric identifier such as your fingerprint along with your mobile phone and a radio-frequency identification (RFID) equipped passport could be access keys to a walk through a tunnel of technology that uses databases to assess risk level, checks you in and assign seating, completes immigration processes and screens for prohibited objects.
Commenting on the recent Yemeni cargo bomb scrare, Bisignani noted that intelligence work and cooperation by Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, United States and United Arab Emirates appears to be what averted disaster.
"The entire supply chain, from manufacturer to airport, has a responsibility for secure shipments," he said. "And this supply chain approach must be driven by government and industry cooperation on investment, processes, technology and risk assessment."
While scanning is important, it "cannot be our first line of defense," he said. "Screening can complement effective intelligence and supply chain solutions. However, there is no technology today that governments have certified to screen standard size pallets and large items. There is some promising technology but it is taking far too long to move from the laboratory to the airport. We must speed up the process."
The HANDGEAR, unveiled in November of 2010, adds another innovative mobile computer to Two Technologies' roster of unique, colorful and eye-catching solutions. Generally thinking outside the box, this time the Horsham, Pennsylvania, based company thought inside the box by coming up with an ultra-rugged mobile computer that's a veritable toolbox of stuff a mobile workforce may need: with a HANDGEAR device, mobile workers can capture pictures, scan bar codes, read mag stripes, capture fingerprints, and even print receipts or citations.
All on top, of course, the regular stuff you'd expect a modern handheld computer to do, like email, browsing, data communication, texting, or apps that use accelerometer or GPS data.
Overall, the HANDGEAR is just jam-packed with ideas that became features. Take photography: while PDAs have had cameras for many years, and almost every phone has one, most of those cameras are virtually useless. Not so what 2T packed into the HANDGEAR. Here you have a sophisticated 5.2mp CMOS sensor that takes 4-megapixel pictures you can actually use for real work (see examples here).
The camera even has a very functional flash and the CMOS imager can be used to read bar codes (Code 128, Code 39, Code 2 of 5, EAN-13, PDF417, UPC and several more). Special development and application software is available for the camera.
The administration’s national strategy for identity management is undergoing a final vetting by the agencies that will be implementing it and is expected to be finalized within few months, Ari Schwartz, senior Internet policy advisor for the National Institute of Standards and Technology said Thursday.
“We expect the strategy to be signed by the president sometime this winter,” Schwartz said at an identity management conference hosted in Washington by TechAmerica.
The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, released in draft form in June, calls for an interoperable, voluntary scheme for identity verification that enhances both security and privacy of online transactions and is easy to use.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a key partner in the development of the strategy, has posted the (39 page) draft NSTIC at http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/ns_tic.pdf
Office and print specialist Ricoh has put biometric authentication technology on its latest multifunction printers as part of a new strategic alliance with Equitrac and BioStore.
Ricoh has joined forces with Equitrac and BioStore to help customers securely release sensitive information from its printers and MFPs.
The combination of technologies creates a secure environment within which only the allocated user's fingerprint can release documents; enhancing the overall document security of an organization. Equitrac software provides customers with the tools needed to efficiently monitor, manage and recover documents.
It works in tandem with BioStore's highly secure, centralized Identity Management System, allowing a single token of identity to be used across separate applications within an organization.
Two things are striking about the trend of using fingerprint scans and electronic cards to make sure kids depart their school bus at the right stop. First, personal privacy is dead at the expense of innovative high-tech security solutions. Second, that's not so bad.
Considering the millions of American children transported daily from their communities to school, it's a statistical given that some will get off at the wrong stop.
Human error on the part of drivers and students, and the grief caused by frightened children stranded in strange neighbourhoods as parents and school districts retrace the maze of previous bus stops is, unfortunately, the norm. That's why a fingerprint scanning system approved by a school district north of San Diego is among the latest nods to the efficiency of technology over paper documentation for tracking students when they get on and off school buses.
"Kids get lost. It happens in every school district, every year," John DeVries, president of Global Biometrics Security told USA Today.
Biometric systems has caused a stir worldwide across sectors from the financial to healthcare. We delve deep into the ins and outs of the system including its implementation in Indian scenario, challenges and limitations.
In the present scenario of increased threat to life, property and information, biometrics is one of the most talked about technology worldwide. In India, the buzz has got momentum with the advent of the UID project.
In this article, we demystify the fingerprint based biometrics systems, the technology which utilizes the power of your touch to secure identity and valuable information.
CSC announced today that the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Consular Affairs awarded the company a task order to provide non-immigrant visa support services in Mexico. The task order, which was awarded during CSC's fiscal 2011 second quarter, has a two-year base period and four one-year options, bringing the estimated total value to $115 million.
It was awarded under the Global Support Strategy (GSS) for Overseas Consular Services indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract that CSC won in March 2010. Under the terms of the task order, CSC will provide non-immigrant visa support services, including information, appointment, fee collection, document delivery, greeter and offsite biometric collection in Mexico. Non-immigrant visas are for international travelers (citizens of other countries) coming to the U.S. temporarily; immigrant visas are for those seeking to move permanently to the U.S.
Will Sri Lanka be one of the group of countries, which are to be the initial target of an Australian initiative to deny undesirable elements from reaching Down Under through legal routes?
A spokesperson for the Australian High Commission yesterday told The Island that Australia was in the early stage of implementing a plan to collect biometrics data from all visa applicants, irrespective of nationality. The official said that the plan would be implemented worldwide on a staggered basis, though they were yet to announce the countries, which could be accommodated initially. Responding to a query by The Island, the official said that the proposed system was similar to that of the British implemented a few years ago.
The latest issue of Asia Pacific Defence Forum carried a brief AFP news item, quoting Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith as saying that Australia would delay naming the countries where visa applicants would need to give fingerprints and face-scans. Stephen admitted that diplomatic effort may be needed with their governments.
The report quoted Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as saying that Australia planned to fingerprint and face-scan visitors from about 10 high risk countries in a bid to combat extremism, which is now a permanent threat.
Facial recognition expert Robert Schmitt has produced a video in which he analyzes a daguerreotype that may be the earliest photographic image taken of Abraham Lincoln against well-known images of the 16th president.
In the video, Schmitt demonstrates how face recognition technology can be utilized to identify and fix key biometric features of a person's face, such as the distance between a person's eyes.
That measurement typically cannot be altered, even with advanced methods of modern plastic surgery.
He illustrates how face recognition technology can be used to identify as the same person young and old photographs of historical figures, including former presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. Schmitt demonstrates how facial biometrics remain constant throughout life, despite aging.
The daguerreotype, identified only as a "Portrait of a Young Man," was obtained in 1977 by collector Albert Kaplan, who purchased the image for $27 from among a group of 100 being sold by an art gallery on 57th Street in New York City.
Upon seeing the unidentified daguerreotype, Kaplan believed the image was Lincoln. A few days later, after he had a chance to examine Lincoln's known photographic images, he became convinced.
"When I first saw it, I thought that there were similarities between the handsome, aristocratic and tastefully groomed young man of the daguerreotype and my mental image of President Lincoln," Kaplan says on the website he has devoted to proving the daguerreotype is the earliest known photographic image of Lincoln.
My name is Michael Roberts, and I am a pilot for ExpressJet Airlines, Inc., based in Houston (that is, I still am for the time being). This morning as I attempted to pass through the security line for my commute to work I was denied access to the secured area of the terminal building at Memphis International Airport. I have passed through the same line roughly once per week for the past four and a half years without incident.
Today, however, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents at this checkpoint were using one of the new Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) systems that are currently being deployed at airports across the nation. These are the controversial devices featured by the media in recent months, albeit sparingly, which enable screeners to see beneath people’s clothing to an extremely graphic and intrusive level of detail (virtual strip searching).
Travelers refusing this indignity may instead be physically frisked by a government security agent until the agent is satisfied to release them on their way in what is being touted as an “alternative option” to AIT. The following is a somewhat hastily drafted account of my experience this morning.
As I loaded my bags onto the X-ray scanner belt, an agent told me to remove my shoes and send them through as well, which I’ve not normally been required to do when passing through the standard metal detectors in uniform. When I questioned her, she said it was necessary to remove my shoes for the AIT scanner. I explained that I did not wish to participate in the AIT program, so she told me
I could keep my shoes and directed me through the metal detector that had been roped off. She then called somewhat urgently to the agents on the other side: "We got an opt-out!" and also reported the "opt-out" into her handheld radio. On the other side I was stopped by another agent and informed that because I had "opted out" of AIT screening, I would have to go through secondary screening.
I asked for clarification to be sure he was talking about frisking me, which he confirmed, and I declined. At this point he and another agent explained the TSA’s latest decree, saying I would not be permitted to pass without showing them my naked body, and how my refusal to do so had now given them cause to put their hands on me as I evidently posed a threat to air transportation security. Read the whole account here.
Watch the interview here:
This is a letter from Captain Dave Bates, the president of the Allied Pilots Association, which represents 11,000 American Airlines pilots, to his members, in which he calls on pilots to refuse back-scatter screening and demand private pat-downs from TSA officers. Bates's argument is multifaceted and extremely cogent. He worries about increased exposure to radiation, of course (a big worry among commercial pilots) and he is eloquent on the subject of intentional humiliation:
There is absolutely no denying that the enhanced pat-down is a demeaning experience. In my view, it is unacceptable to submit to one in public while wearing the uniform of a professional airline pilot. I recommend that all pilots insist that such screening is performed in an out-of-view area to protect their privacy and dignity.
It is a source of continual astonishment to me that pilots -- many of whom, it should be pointed out, are military veterans who possess security clearances -- are not allowed to carry onboard their airplanes pocket knives and bottles of shampoo, but then they're allowed to fly enormous, fuel-laden, missile-like objects over American cities.
Read the whole letter here
At many airports around the U.S., the Transportation Security Administration is now using full body scanner machines and also much more invasive pat-down searches. While passengers are supposed to be told that they have a right to opt out of the body scanners, in some cases, TSA employees are not giving them any other option.
If you do not want your body to be scanned by a machine that uses x-rays to create a naked outline of your body, you may insist on your right to opt out of the full body scanners. But, you may then be subjected to an invasive pat-down of your body at the hands of TSA screeners.
The TSA has recently changed its guidelines and these pat-downs are now much more invasive. Screeners are now authorized to use the front of their hands and to touch areas around breasts and groins. Passengers being screened are supposed to be given privacy during these more invasive pat-downs and the searches are supposed to be done by screeners of the same sex. Opting for the pat-down will take more time.
"TSA is in the process of implementing new pat-down procedures at checkpoints nationwide as one of our many layers of security to keep the traveling public safe. Pat-downs are one important tool to help TSA detect hidden and dangerous items such as explosives. Passengers should continue to expect an unpredictable mix of security layers that include explosives trace detection, advanced imaging technology, canine teams, among others."
Here some video clips on the new enhanced pat down procedures.
Comment:
This last video clip is from Fox News
It seems to embrace this new enhanced invasion on the last private spaces left…(it’s making me sick, sorry). Is this the way the people in the USA must get acquainted to the ‘new normal’ ?
School districts are turning to high-tech solutions — from fingerprint scans to electronic cards — to track kids on school buses and keep them from getting off at the wrong stops.
The latest: A fingerprint scanning system, approved this month for testing at the Desert Sands district, northeast of San Diego. Students will be scanned as they get on and off the bus.
"Kids get lost. It happens in every school district, every year," says John DeVries, president of Global Biometrics Security, which developed the Biometric Observation Security System (BOSS) that's being tested.
It happened Oct. 13 when a Prince George's County (Md.) school employee took a 5-year-old student to the wrong bus and the student got off several blocks from home. "That just shouldn't happen," says district spokesman Darrell Pressley. He says the district is now considering a system.
With BOSS, students' fingerprints are scanned and sent to a database. When they get off, they provide a "check out" print. An alarm sounds if the child tries to get off at the wrong place.
M2SYS Technology, a global fingerprint, finger vein and palm vein biometrics research and development firm, announced today that it has struck a partnership with H.P.C. Informatique, a computer reseller in the West African nation of Benin, to meet the growing demands for biometric technology in the region.
The partnership is designed to combine the innovative biometric fingerprint, finger vein and palm vein technology prowess of M2SYS with the renowned reputation and resource depth of H.P.C. to deliver biometric solutions that meet the growing demand for information security, identity protection and public safety.
H.P.C. will carry M2SYS' fingerprint, finger vein and palm vein biometric readers, Hybrid Biometric Platform™ software, TimeShield™ biometric time clock, and Enterprise Biometrics Suite — a single sign-on biometric password management and network security system. These biometric technology solutions can be deployed in areas such as health care identification, information security, integration into identification documents and public safety.
The Republic of Armenia is facing the objective of establishing know-how-based economy with the know-how-based infrastructure being one of the most important elements. Development of information technologies by the state assumes introduction of E-governance system, which in its turn requires innovations in the area of technologies. For the effective introduction of e-governance it is necessary to have secure and effective identification of all system participants, which will be possible to realize through introduction of common identification system.
Any citizen of Armenia above 16 will have an electronic identification card which is going to replace the current passport and serve as a passport in the territory of Armenia. The Card will contain information on a citizen and will be protected with special security instruments. In the future it may serve also as medical card, driving license, payment card.
Ayonix, Inc. Japan, a leading Image technology solution provider, today announced the release of Ayonix Public Security (APS ver2.1), a new real-time facial detection and recognition surveillance product aimed at safely identifying criminals as well as suspects in public locations such as Airports, Train stations, Trade-centers, Stadiums, and public malls.
With these recent APS update, Ayonix's APS product now greatly benefits from the additional performance boost provided by the new image processing algorithm, as evidenced by recent tests. More specifically, the processing speed in APS ver2.1 has been 10 times faster than other releases. Users can now achieve real-time face recognition in public locations. And whereas previously it was difficult to recognize identities while people were walking, APS ver2.1 now makes a walk-through facial recognition feasible.
MaxID, a leading provider of identity solutions is pleased to announce the sale and deployment of iDL500 portable multi-modal TWIC readers to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for a pilot program.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the principal investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the second largest investigative agency in the federal government
“The iDL500 portable multi-modal computer is well-suited for demanding field work whether it be credential or biometrics verification, field-based enrollment or badging . We are looking forward to supporting the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and working with them towards a more broad-based deployment of devices and software similar to what we’ve been able to achieve with the US Coast Guard " said Brian Skiba, President of MaxID Corp US.
The IDL500 datasheet can be found here.
LaserCard Corporation, a leading provider of secure ID solutions, will highlight its capabilities in delivering multi-technology travel ID solutions at the Sixth International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Symposium in Montreal from November 1 – 4, Booth #28.
“Considerable technical and manufacturing expertise is required to ensure that the result conforms to international standards in terms of size, security, functionality and durability while delivering a uniformly high standard of security across all functions.”
New ID programs are increasingly viewed as an opportunity to increase efficiency as well as protect and ensure the identity of the holder. A growing number of projects now call for powerful multi-purpose ID credentials that operate securely on several levels, not only providing proof of identity but also enabling functions such as faster processing at border crossings.
LaserCard will demonstrate options for integrating customized combinations of technologies in major ID programs, incorporating technologies such as integrated circuit chips, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, and optical security media into a single credential. The Company will also showcase its concept-to-implementation consulting and support services that help customers to achieve predictable and productive results from large-scale ID projects.
Calling it a “game changing technology” Los Alamos Technical Associates, Inc. (LATA) has installed the SafeRise® system from (the Israeli company) FST21 in its downtown Chicago office in September. The LATA entrance now allows access by recognizing employees by the way they look, talk and walk, as well as being aware if they are in distress, and can even carry a conversation with them and their visitors.
The SafeRise® system modernizes the way people enter buildings, offices and secure areas. No key, no card and no code are required. Using second generation biometrics with a combination of face, voice, license plate and pattern of behavior recognition, SafeRise provides easy, automated, and convenient identity management access while maintaining the highest level of security.
“This is the first system based on fusion technology that integrates facial recognition, voice recognition, and behavioral recognition into a cohesive identification system.” said Anderson. “This is leading edge technology with a fusion of biometric technologies that delivers what it promises…and it does more, which is exactly what LATA was looking for. Any single (one) biometric system may be circumvented or fooled, but a combination (fusion) of biometric systems becomes almost impossible to fool.”
Watch the video on YouTube
View a presentation to understand how SafeRise works
Scientists from Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) are analyzing possible attempts at fraud in various biometric identification systems in order to improve the security of facial, iris, fingerprint or vascular recognition, among other types.
The field that these researchers are working in is known by its nickname, "anti-spoofing," and basically consists in trying to detect all of the possible attempts at fraud that a biometric system might suffer, especially with regard to an action in which the user presents the biometric proof to the system. "What we are trying to do is detect those attempts so that the system can then act accordingly," explains the head of UC3M's Grupo Universitario de Tecnologías de Identificación (GUTI)(University Identification Technology Group), Raúl Sánchez Reíllo, who is leading this research. This way, if someone used a colored contact lens to recreate a specific iris at an access control point, the system would detect this possible fraud attempt and would indicate to this user that s/he could not use the automatic system and would have to use the manual identification system, with a security agent, for example.
These scientists work on "anti-spoofing" related to most of the forms of biometric identification. In addition, they evaluate the strength of current biometric systems in the face of various types of attacks, and they also create algorithms, devices and collateral techniques and usage policies that avoid and detect these attempts at fraud. "Currently, we are working very intensely on the ocular iris as well as written signatures, although previously we have worked on fingerprints, and in the near future we will be working on facial recognition," comments this professor from UC3M's Electronic Technology Department (Departamento de Tecnología Electrónica de la UC3M), pointing out that the challenges in this field are enormous.
The reason: there is a constant struggle between "good" and "evil," in which the latter is constantly trying to find new ways to attack the security of the system. "Let's say that the good guys work to stay a step ahead of those attempts, introducing anti-fraud measures in advance of what the bad guys might come up with ," he reveals.
More on this research topic can be found on:
http://www.uc3m.es/portal/page/portal/actualidad_cientifica/noticias/biometric_fraud
BI2 Technologies will release its Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System (MORIS) in November. The company has already pre-released several units for testing and has received encouraging feedback. “It’s a major advance in terms of having multimodal capability, iris, facial and fingerprint on one device that’s as ubiquitous and easy to use as any cell phone in the nation,” says Sean Mullin, president and CEO of BI2 Technologies.
“The fingerprint scanner is a FIPS 201 and FBI compliant and should be able to integrate with any FIPS and AFIS compliant system. The facial recognition system can take advantage of legacy investments in mugshots that are already there.”
BI2 Technologies is also looking at how its products can play in the federal marketplace outside of law enforcement. “There’s quite a bit of activity now for us in the Department of Defense, some of the intelligence agencies and absolutely in the law enforcement agencies at the federal level,” Mullin says.
Watch the video here
Newly developed software for mobile phones could bypass PIN numbers and passwords by recognizing the landmarks of your face as you look at the phone’s front-facing camera. Technology developed at the University of Manchester, and funded by the EU based Mobile Biometrics project, tracks your face in real-time, and is believed to be unrivalled in its speed and accuracy of recognizing your facial features.
Unlike typical, more limited types of facial identification that can only give an approximate position and scale of the face, this app can see the exact location of your eyes, nose, mouth and jaw line.
"A mobile phone with a camera on the front captures a video of your face and tracks twenty-two facial features,“ said Dr Phil Tresadern, lead researcher on the project. “This can make face recognition more accurate, and has great potential for novel ways of interacting with your phone.”
Cognitec Systems, - a leader in face recognition technology and systems, was presenting its latest line of products at the Biometrics 2010 being held at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London, October 20-21, 2010.
Cognitec's presentation includes:
· A new version of Cognitec's biometric face recognition FaceVACS-VideoScan software: Person identification through video surveillance cameras using multiple cameras in real-time, based on Cognitec's unique face tracker technology.
· Innovative facial recognition technology used to match crime scene photos and surveillance video images against mug shot repository for suspect identification, based on Cognitec's latest facial database search engine FaceVACS-DBScan and tools to enhance and inspect images.
· Image capturing and quality assessment based on ISO criteria for ePassport images: Cognitec's solution features real-time feedback to persons being photographed as well as advanced camera control which ensures the capturing of optimal images.
More on these products can be found here.
Access control is fast developing into a source of ( intelligence for employers, because of the biometric analysis of fingerprints, technology and services company Ideco Biometric Security Solutions COO Marius Coetzee reports. Biometrics has revolutionized the security industry, with (greater-improved control of who has permission to enter certain areas of an organization than (offered by traditional identity management systems. Access control in a warehousing scenario, for example, is evolving to (encompass continuous verification of which employee is handling specific goods at any point along the order process trail. The latest development is that biometrics is now being incorporated into the entire order process trail, using a mobile scanner that scans a fingerprint and the labels on containers (arriving at a terminal, before the containers can be opened.
BIO-key International, Inc. / announced the successful deployment by South Africa's largest petrochemical and energy group of BIO-key's fingerprint biometrics to secure access to Bridge People & Technology's KnowHow, a Learning Management and Performance Evaluation system.
Over the past 9 years Bridge has been enhancing KnowHow along with best business practices as well as requirements from its clients, to enable it to be an integral part of the training landscape for all of its clients.
BIO-key's fingerprint biometric identification is the latest feature to be added to KnowHow so that with the simple touch of a finger, an employee can quickly and securely log into the KnowHow solution.
Bergen County, N.J. had a problem. They needed to keep track of how often homeless people received services like food and shelter, but they did not have a reliable way of identifying them. Funding for the Department of Human Services relies on getting an accurate count of how many homeless people they serve. However, since many don't have identification, and others balk at filling out forms or sitting for interviews, a fingerprint scan is a surefire way to make sure everyone gets counted and no one gets counted twice.
The county paid the San Antonio-based Fulcrum Biometrics $90,000 to develop the custom system, which coordinates finger scanners at Department of Human Services locations with the data kept by the vaguely creepy-sounding New Jersey Homeless Management Information System. It only takes a few seconds for the scanners to identify an individual and log their visit.
AuthenWare®, a leading cybersecurity software provider, announced that it has partnered with toBiz Technology, allowing it to resell the company's flagship second-factor authentication security software. toBiz
Technology is a software and IT consulting company that specializes in providing value-added consulting and emerging technologies to the Korean financial services industry. AuthenWare utilizes keystroke dynamics, a form of behavioral biometrics, to recognize valid users and to stop identity theft, web fraud and other system intrusions.
AuthenWare's zero-footprint approach towards user validation and authentication incorporates a series of biometric security algorithms that record and measure how a person uniquely types their credentials. The multi-dimensional product combines the user's typing information with other behavioral and environmental heuristics to ensure that any stolen credentials are rendered useless.
The toBiz Technology partnership continues AuthenWare's global expansion efforts by offering sales and support coverage focused on helping Korean companies rapidly and cost-effectively protect their systems and Web applications against malicious intruders and unauthorized internal employees alike. Under the reseller agreement, toBiz Technology will also provide a demonstrable native language version of AuthenWare to its customers.
Biometric specialist from 3M Canada, Colin McGeachey, announced at the Biometrics 2010 conference in London that the Caribbean leads the world in multi-country biometric border control programs with 15 different countries and 18 airports operating on the same facial biometrics and fingerprint-based system. Other places where biometric acceptance is soaring includes Frankfurt airport in Germany where the passport gates accept biometrically-enabled passports from 62 countries.
Further evidence that the use of iris recognition technology is expanding around the globe and it is being utilized in a enormous range of commercial and government applications ranging from access control to time management. ASSA ABLOY Future Lab examines how this biometric technology is breaking new ground in identity management and other security applications. Applications for iris-recognition access systems include a major hotel in Boston that uses it for guests staying in the high-end presidential suite and another Boston organization in Boston uses the technology to keep a record of children in the event they ever go missing and must be identified.
One of the serious threats to a user's computer is a software program that might cause unwanted keystroke sequences to occur in order to hack someone's identity. This form of an attack is increasing, infecting enterprise and personal computers, and caused by "organized malicious botnets," said Daphne Yao, assistant professor of computer science at Virginia Tech.
To combat the "spoofing attacks," Yao and her former student, Deian Stefan, now a graduate student in the computer science department at Stanford University, developed an authentication framework called "Telling Human and Bot Apart" (TUBA), a remote biometrics system based on keystroke-dynamics information.
The uniqueness of Yao and Stefan's research is they studied how to identify when a computer program designed by a hacker was producing keystroke sequences in order to spoof others," they said. Then they created TUBA to monitor a user's typing patterns.
Using TUBA, Yao and Stefan tested the keystroke dynamics of 20 individuals, and used the results as a way to authenticate who might be using a computer. "Our work shows that keystroke dynamics is robust against the synthetic forgery attacks studied, where the attacker draws statistical samples from a pool of available keystroke datasets other than the target," Yao said.
Science Applications International Corp. will continue providing biometrics support to U.S. Central Command under a three-year task order that could be worth more than $23 million. Under the task order, awarded under the Biometrics Operations and Support Services-Unrestricted contract, SAIC will provide the U.S. military and its coalition partners with biometric enrollment support at entry ports throughout Iraq.
Registering people in biometric databases is critical in helping identify insurgents throughout the Central Command's area of responsibility, according to an SAIC statement. The company has supported the biometric-enabled enrollments for the past six years.
Ceelox, Inc. announced today that they have engaged Identification Technology Partners, Inc. (IDTP) to assess their products and provide a mapping for application within U.S. Government agencies. The US Government is a targeted vertical within the company's continued growth strategy. Over the past few years, the US Government has been an early adopter of new technologies surrounding biometrics. Given this vision, Ceelox has been working on a marketing and sales strategy aimed at this opportunity.
Part of this process includes mapping of their existing products which provide:
· Identity-Based Access Authentication -- to ensure only authorized individuals gain access to hardware, networks, data and applications, websites, flourishing cloud computing applications;
· File and Folder Encryption -- to protect sensitive data on computers or portable data devices;
· and Email Encryption -- to protect sensitive information sent from desktop to desktop. "
The US Government is one of the greatest adopters and users of biometric technologies for authentication and data encryption which is an excellent fit with the Ceelox product line," said Gerry Euston, Ceelox CEO. "We are pleased to team with IDTP, leverage their expertise, and develop a plan to expand our marketing and sales into the US Government."
MobileFrame, announced the launch of its Healthcare Application Suite, which enables healthcare organizations of any size or type to increase patient health outcomes, eliminate paper-based data collection and reduce liabilities as well.
This suite of applications provides the ability to collect rich data types securely including Digital Photos, Barcode Scans, Digital Signature Capture, Sketches, Voice Notes, GPS, RFID, Biometrics and Real-Time Notifications.
The suite consists of two primary modules Patient Care Application and Hospital Management. It also includes Home Healthcare Visits; First Responder; Paternity Declaration; Durable Medical Equipment Tracking; Clinical Trials and Emergency Medical Services."
A law-enforcement expert weighs in on biometrics. He sees biometric facial recognition as something that is not as unique as a fingerprint, but it will reduce the number of possible matches in the data pool to something manageable. "All of us accumulate a lot of keys over time.
We have locker keys, door keys, desk drawer keys, car keys, padlock keys, and keys that just appeared one day with no apparent use or function. If you have keys, you have probably lost keys, too. What if you had a key that was impossible to lose? That is biometrics," he says.
Through a Public Consultations Findings report, the Canadian Passport department has been listening to the opinions of Canada's citizens when it comes to the safety and service provided by the country's passport. This year's report focused heavily on Canada's ePassport system, which users supported. Overall, citizens expressed a general satisfaction with the idea of an ePassport containing biometric information.
The device would contain biometric data, such as photographs for facial recognition, and supplement plastic ID cards for international travel.
There were, however, concerns about fingerprinting. While most citizens are accepting of biometric data in passports, they are reticent to allow all forms of biometrics into the identification system.
Due to privacy concerns, individuals are not ready to place information such as digital fingerprints into the electronic passport system.
Greg Gilmour is a tinkerer. He's also a gun owner. He had his mind set on a biometric gun safe, because Greg is a responsible geek, and, after all, such weapon storage "is something straight out of a James Bond film," he says. If you're not familiar, a biometric gun safe is simply a safe that's unlocked with fingerprints. No keys, no passcodes, no PINs--just your fingerprint. It's a secure way to go. The thing is, they're expensive. Being something of a geek like the rest of us here at Crave, Greg thought that he could build his own. And he did.
Unique self-serve kiosk simplifies hospital check-in, reduces wait times and increases patient satisfaction. Agfa HealthCare, a leading provider of diagnostic imaging and healthcare IT solutions, announces recently that it is introducing its latest workflow enhancement solution: IMPAX Kiosk*. Less waiting, more satisfaction. IMPAX Kiosk is an interactive system that enables patients to register with, and check-in to hospital services without going through the traditional administration desks.
"For the patients, traditional check-in means waiting in a line before being afforded the opportunity to be personally checked-in by a receptionist. This can take fifteen minutes or more," explains Sarah Muckler, Senior Marketing Manager for Agfa HealthCare US. "With IMPAX Kiosk, we can reduce the check-in process time to five minutes." This both increases the patients' satisfaction, and frees the administrative staff to focus on their core responsibilities.
It seems that international spy rings are borrowing the luck of the Irish, and the Irish don't like it one bit. Irish passports have become the document de jour for international spies and assassins, a trend that highlights the immense challenges facing those who wish to keep U.S. borders safe. In 2005,
Eunan Doherty, a fireman from the remote northwest Ireland county of Donegal, went to the Russian Embassy in Dublin to get a visa for a vacation trip to Russia. His holiday allegedly turned him into an unwitting participant in a now-famous international Russian spy ring.
Four years later, a Russian agent using the name Richard Murphy flew to Rome to pick up a forged passport bearing Doherty's name, and was told to bring it into the U.S. and give it to another Russian spy, according to an affidavit made public by the U.S. government in June. Murphy was told to identify the courier by uttering the line, "Excuse me, could we have met in Malta in 1999?" the affidavit said.
Shoppers are being asked to scan their fingerprints to buy booze and cigarettes at a minimarket. Staff invite them to join a database that stores their details in a crackdown on under-age drinking. Customers then scan their finger on future visits instead of showing proof they are over 18. But civil liberties campaigners claim the move at 25 Scots Spar stores - including Clydebank, Renfrew and Dundee - breaches people's privacy. Anna Fairclough, legal officer at Liberty, said: "Collecting customers' biometric information is completely over the top.
Shop supervisor Michael Dick said: "It causes a lot less hassle. Now we don't have people shouting at us for alcohol because they've got no ID. You can't have the excuse that your passport or driving license is at home any more.
"Your ID is your finger and you can't leave that at home."The system will not be used for Lottery tickets or fireworks, which are also restricted to over-18s.
A new indictment was issued Friday in the 1987 rapes of two women at the Huntington Mall. Donald Eugene Good was indicted on multiple counts of kidnapping, aggravated robbery, sexual abuse and assault, according to information released during a news conference Friday. Good already is serving time in the Mount Olive Correctional Center after having been convicted in November 1992 with murder. He was sentenced to life with mercy. He is scheduled to be arraigned in the rape cases Oct. 29. Good is the second person to have been charged in connection with the two Huntington Mall rapes. Glen Dale Woodall was convicted in 1987, but was exonerated in 1992 after DNA evidence cleared him. The new indictment stems from information entered into CODIS, the FBI's DNA database, this summer. The West Virginia State Police DNA Technical Leader, Sheri Lemons, put DNA evidence from the case into the system and found the match. She said that during her career, she has only seen such a match happen four times.
The new indictment was made possible because of advances in DNA technology, she said.
Accenture unveiled a new large scale biometric identity matching solution today at Biometrics 2010 designed to help public service agencies accurately verify the identity of individuals, whether for the purposes of detecting potential national security threats or for improving the delivery of government assistance programs and social services to eligible citizens.
Accenture's Large Scale Matching Solution enables the timely and accurate identification of individuals while reducing the costs of identity assurance. The solution is able to de-duplicate all available identity data including biographic and, if available, biometric data. It is highly secure, flexible, built on proven, open standards, and scalable when deployed to a cloud platform.
Download the Accenture’s point of view on the future of Identity Management here.
Their point of view on Border Management here.
Daon, the award-winning global provider of identity assurance software and services an-nounced today that New Zealand has joined the growing number of countries around the world who have chosen Daon software for identity management. Daon's software and ser-vices have been selected for use by the New Zealand Department of Labour to support the Immigration Biometrics Evaluation contract, which will collect, store and match finger and face biometric data using fixed, portable and handheld biometric capture stations.
The key business processes which will be evaluated for biometric use include visa processing and border control. Chosen from among 11 bidders, Daon commenced work on August 23 and will deliver the project in four phases during the contract term. The technologies being evalu-ated during the trial include leading biometric acquisition devices, fraud investigation tools, handheld devices, and various forms of authentication.
Daon provides a centralized platform and client biometric infrastructure for a variety of uses including employee credentialing, government benefits programs, trusted identity services, border management, national ID, airport e-gate systems and immigration control. Daon's innovative Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) software, industry recognized expertise and large scale program experience enables the delivery of solutions that reduce risk, schedule and cost.
London, Biometrics Exhibition and Conference, October 19, 2010
Morpho (Safran group) is proud to announce that, for the first time anywhere in the world, people will be able to use their fingers to sign electronic documents with the same legally binding status as with a handwritten signature. In Antalya, Turkey, on September 22 at the 11th International Common Criteria Conference, the “Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d‟information” (ANSSI*) announced the EAL5+ Common Criteria certification of Morpho‟s IDeal CitizTM smart card.
This makes it the first “Secure Signature Creation Device” as required by the 1999/93/EC Directive of the European Parliament and the Council, on fingerprint biometrics for strong user authentication in legal digital signatures. IDeal CitizTM meets identification needs in both government and private markets.
This pioneering certification officially confirms the leading worldwide position of Morpho’s fingerprint Match-on-Card (MoC) algorithm, which recently ranked first in the United States by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), as part of its fingerprint interoperability campaign, MINEX II. An overview of NIST Minex I and II can be found here.
When provided to citizens as a national identity card, this privacy-focused technology will mark a huge step forward. It enables citizens to safely connect to paperless government e-services “at the touch of a fingertip,” replacing the 6-digit personal identification codes that are easily lost or forgotten.
Biometric technology is at the forefront of governmental initiatives to make administration smoother and more efficient. This move towards automation and biometric technology is expected to yield considerable benefits over a period of time. A large Probation Department is using Bayometric‟s technology to automate the reporting of low risk probationers. Probation Reporting Kiosk (PRK) is expected to add teeth to beleaguered legal enforcement agencies by automating the reporting routine of low value probationers. This automated biometric system will allow Probation Officers to concentrate on high risk probationers, making the legal system more effective and boosting the efficiency of probationer reporting routines.
Five years after Congress passed a law requiring the Federal Aviation Administration to re-place paper licenses for commercial pilots with tamper-resistant identification cards that in-clude pilots' photos and biometric data, the agency has not done so. FAA has issued plastic ID cards, however, but they do not include photos or biometric identifiers. A Florida lawmaker wants to know why.
In a letter to the heads of FAA, the Homeland Security Department and the Transportation Security Administration, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., demanded to know why the agency was flouting the law.
The 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, Public Law 108-458, mandated that by December 2005 FAA begin issuing improved pilot licenses that include a photograph of the licensee and are capable of accommodating a digital photograph, biometric identifier, "or any other unique identifier." In his letter, Mica said he became aware of the issue recently when a pilot asked Mica to look at his FAA license.
Although commercial pilot licenses are no longer paper, they still do not include a biometric chip or photograph. Currently, the only photo image is one of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Mica noted.
"It is mind-boggling that six years later, after spending millions of dollars, the FAA license does not include the pilot's photo, or any biometric measures," Mica, ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said in a statement.
In a world that is increasingly cantered in technology, credit card companies are coming up with new ways to protect your identity – methods that, just a few years ago, were mere fantasy and they are being met with great success. Many of these new identity protection safeguards use biometric technology. This form of identity protection is the most favoured by consumers, with almost two-thirds of cardholders preferring biometric identity confirmation to other forms of identity confirmation such as pin numbers and signatures.
This is typically completed through the use of a fingerprint reader. New credit cards being debuted currently may require that your fingerprint be read at the checkout, or alternatively, that your credit card have a scanning device imbedded in it so that it could not be used unless your finger-print was scanned first.
In the near future, many cards will protect your identity by eschewing static numbers. You would have a keypad on your credit card, and the card would not have any numbers printed on it. Instead, you would enter your PIN code onto the keypad prior to making a purchase in order to activate the card. A unique number would be generated each time you did so; it would be a single-use number that appears only in the register computer.
Or imagine being able to store a fully functional computer inside a thin plastic credit card. This technology may not be too far off according to Chandanlong. Be assured that it will come loaded with features like Bluetooth, GPS Receiver, and have built-in Wi-Fi despite its size.
System Validates Identities for Personnel Supporting National Emergencies
Northrop Grumman Corporation and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recently coordinated a nationwide demonstration showing the ability to deploy a common, interoperable credentialing system that enables electronic identity authentication for government and industry personnel. The demonstration, dubbed "Autumn Blend," showed the use of standardized personal identity credentials operating across multiple domains, such as a government's or company's credential authentication infrastructure, for access management decisions, situational awareness, cyber-secure capabilities and post-event reconstruction. Participants included federal, state, local, and private sector emergency response and recovery officials who are assigned to the front lines for rescue or recovery missions.
General Dynamics Information Technology, a business unit of General Dynamics, has been awarded a $24.8 million task order by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
The task order, under the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Enterprise Acquisition Gateway for Leading Edge Solutions (EAGLE) contract, has a three-year term if all options are exercised.
Under this task order, General Dynamics will manage the production of immigration credentials including the USCIS Permanent Resident Cards (PRC) and the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) for DHS. The work will be performed in Corbin, Ky.
"We are constantly forced to deal with the question of 'good enough' in security," said Scott Crawford, a managing research director at Enterprise Management Associates. "While in some cases the 'good enough' approach is inadequate, as shown by the large number of data breaches reported, the practical approach is to weigh all one's options.
" Biometric security is being heavily used in some of the United States' most critical installations. How reliable are biometric systems, anyhow? What happens if you have a cold or haven't had enough sleep and your voice is hoarse, your nose is running, and your pupils are contracted or dilated? Can security systems mistakenly identify you as a terrorist or a person of interest in an ongoing police investigation?
Security Only Needs to Be Good Enough
How large does a biometric security system's database need to be in order to provide accurate results? That depends -- security is always a tradeoff between the ideal and the possible.
"When used for security, you are trying for a high confidence match, and are not searching to see if there's anyone else like you in the world," Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told TechNewsWorld.
Most biometric security systems are designed on a probabilistic basis, meaning the more likely a breach is, the tighter the security. Doing otherwise would make security solutions highly expensive and slow.
Campaign Focuses on Secure Storage of Prescription Medications at Home
Purdue Pharma and the National Community Pharmacists Association recently announced the launch of a national educational campaign called "Safeguard My Meds," to increase awareness about the importance of safe storage and disposal of prescription medications. The RxDrugSAFE™ is featured in the launch as a product that securely stores prescription medications in an effort to prevent misuse and abuse of powerful and potentially dangerous drugs. It uses unique fingerprint technology to prevent unauthorized access. It can recognize up to 120 different users.
The "Safeguard My Meds" program focuses on parental responsibility for safe and secure storage of prescription medications in the home and offers valuable suggestions to parents on how to prevent unwanted access to prescription medications. For more info about this program, please visit http://www.safeguardmymeds.org.
"We are absolutely thrilled with and commend Purdue Pharma and the National Community Pharmacist Association for developing this much needed program and taking the lead in addressing the very pressing problem of prescription drug abuse," said Lorraine Yarde, CEO at RxSAFES, Inc. "We designed the RxDrugSAFE™ specifically to offer families a real, yet convenient security solution for the problem of unrestricted access to prescription drugs in the home.
The inevitable endpoint of sanctuary cities desire to protect illegal aliens is now in sight - a halt of all fingerprint sharing by localities with state and federal authorities. The Huffington Post has a report from Santa Clara county, California, where supervisors are plotting on how they can prevent ICE from deporting illegal aliens taken into custody. "The county is also looking into ways to put limits on the fingerprints sent to the state's database, which is monitored by ICE. This has been done in El Paso County, Texas, where the sheriff says he only shares fingerprints from Class B misdemeanors and above."
The end point of these types of policies will mean an end to effective criminal identification once criminals realize they can commit crimes in Santa Clara and other counties without worrying that a check of their records will reveal outstanding warrants or other reasons to hold them. The move to stop fingerprint sharing will not stop with low-level crimes; the inevitable push will be to allow cities to withhold any and all fingerprints from being sent to state and federal fingerprint identification centers.
BIO-key International, Inc. and Medflow Incorporated, announced the release of TruStaff" fingerprint biometric log-in for securing access to Medflow Electronic Health Records. "BIO-key's TruStaff fingerprint biometric log-in delivers a new level of security, reliability and user convenience when accessing the Medflow Electronic Health Records Solution, enabling medical staff to quickly establish their identity," commented Ben Hammel, Director of Identity Management Solutions for BIO-key International. "With this cost effective solution, only the simple touch of a finger is needed for a clinician to quickly access the Medflow EHR solution at any point in the patient care process.
In addition to improving patient safety and protecting their privacy, TruStaff improves workflow and provides more time for patient care by eliminating the need for passwords which are easily lost, forgotten or potentially compromised."
Unisys Corp. has announced results from its poll that points to two-thirds of consumers supporting the use of fingerprints in place of or in addition to signatures, PIN numbers or photo IDs for identity verification with credit card purchases. Specifically, in the responses from over 300 consumers, 63 percent chose fingerprints as the best way to prove their ownership of a credit card as compared with 20 percent choosing photo verification, 13 percent choosing PIN numbers and six percent choosing signatures. Unisys is hopeful these poll results in addition to other polls that showed overwhelming support for biometrics in airport security point to a general increase in comfort and support for incorporating biometric technology into everyday life.
Ceelox, Inc. announced that it will begin offer its products for sale on Amazon.com. The company's initial offering will be its Ceelox ID® PC Edition coupled with a fingerprint biometric sensor.
Ceelox" fingerprint biometrics reduces the chance that an unauthorized person could access your computer services, files, or networks. Each user simply authenticates their identity via fingerprint scanner. This provides a much stronger access authentication than user name and passwords that can be lost, stolen, forgotten or shared. Ceelox ID PC Edition offers convenient password replacement with the swipe of a finger. "We are excited about expanding our sales to consumers," stated Gerry Euston, Ceelox CEO. "Amazon offers a reliable service for people."
For more information visit the website at www.ceelox.com or to the product list at Amazon
With just four months to the February 2011 elections in Uganda, queries are being raised on multiple registrations in the national voters' register. But the Electoral Commission (EC) and the German IT firm Muhlbauer High Tech International, contracted by the EC to work on the register, are defending the register arguing that no election in the world can achieve 100 percent perfection. Now with the help of Muhlbauer you have facial recognition and finger print biometric system. With Muhlbauer project there are two types of biometrics. Biometrics is the only way to uniquely identify a person because people change names, and date of birth so you can only identify an individual by using technology. The technology we are using in this exercise is automated finger print identification system (FS) and facial recognition system (FRS
For more information go to the Muhlbauer website
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh officially launched the massive identification effort in India last week. The UID project is considered by many specialists to be the most technologically and logistically complex national identification effort ever attempted. Nandan Nilekani, chairman of India's Unique Identification Authority, assembled an elite group of software engineers, tech-savvy bureaucrats and biometric experts to build a system that could issue unique 12-digit numbers to all the country's 1.2 billion people, based on fingerprints and iris scans. Most of the tech gurus that designed the unique ID system were of Indian-origin, and volunteered to help the effort without pay.
Fujitsu Frontech North America Inc., announced the integration of its award-winning PalmSecure" palm vein biometric authentication technology with the Crystal IT Avert" Access Control system. The joint solution combines biometrics and RFID technologies to deliver endpoint security for individual workstations, preventing unauthorized user access, protecting proprietary information, and eliminating passwords, all while reducing administrative costs and ensuring regulatory compliance.
The future of biometric scanning may not be at your fingertips, or in front of your eyes. Apparently, it could be in your ears. As the Telegraph reports, researchers at the University of Southampton in the U.K. have now created a system capable of scanning and analyzing ear structures, which, they claim, are unique enough to accurately identify people.
The researchers are hopeful that their new system could help airport security workers instantly identify passengers by scanning their ears, and comparing the results against a database of ear shapes. "With facial recognition, the systems are often confused by crow's feet and other signs of aging," lead researcher Mark Nixon says. "Your ears, however, age very gracefully. They grow proportionally larger and your lobe gets a bit more elongated, but otherwise your ears are fully formed from birth." An ear scan system would also offer passport control workers a faster, less invasive alternative to retina scanning, which requires passengers to stare at scanners from a close range.
Human Recognition Systems (HRS), M-flow concept allows airport operators to efficiently manage the movement of passengers across security boundaries in the airports. M-flow integrates an intelligent software platform that monitors specific human behaviours, with physical security barriers to both control and manage the flow of passengers through restricted zones; significantly enhancing the security levels while reducing operating costs.
M-flow provides airports a fully automated, robust and secure solution to overcome the challenges of physically monitoring passenger movement from airside to landside. HRS has worked closely with leading airport operators, law enforcement agencies and the Department for Transport to ensure that M-flow meets all airport/government regulations and provides an automated, un-manned alternative to physically securing boundaries with security guards.
Download the MFlow brochure if you want more info.
M-flow is currently operational at Manchester Airport and is soon to be deployed at further UK airports.
Facial recognition biometrics are increasingly being used by law enforcement agencies for lead generation and the iFace system is about to be launched in Victoria, Australia for just that reason - but they are still some distance from being used as evidence in court according to leading experts that spoke at the Biometrics Institute's 11th Australian conference.
According to Richard Vorder Bruegge, a senior photographic technologist with the FBI, who delivered one of the keynote addresses at the conference which was held in Sydney last week;
"We can use biometrics to develop leads, but forensics are what we need to take to court." Although facial recognition tools have improved considerably in recent years, there was still the chance of the technology failing to recognize a face, or recognizing the wrong face he said. "If you are misidentified something very bad can happen to you. With facial recognition one in 1000 is inaccurate."
Sarnoff Corporation and ePortation demonstrated its new Glance iris recognition system for high-speed biometric identification at ports and other critical infrastructure during ASIS 2010. Using Sarnoff's proven iris image capture system that quickly images the iris of a person in motion and at a distance, the system offers high-speed and highly accurate identity verification even in the harshest outdoor climates. While other iris scanning technologies require users to stop or closely stare into a scanner, Sarnoff's technology works differently.
It verifies identities in seconds, at an arm's length distance, allowing quick and easy access. Together with ePortation's industry-leading, real time access and rule management solutions, the system allows a facility to be secured according to local policies while linking together multiple site locations for an overall, global view of access activity. This real-time information is seamlessly made available to security administrators and off-site fusion centers.
A recent study found that the typical mobile banking on-boarding process banks use, in which they get people to sign up online, is too slow and cumbersome. On the other, because mobile banking customers are susceptible to Trojans, botnets and other types of fraud, it's important to make sure the user is who he or she says she is. Citibank Australia plans to to roll-out voice biometrics for identification. A person's voiceprint is more accurate than their fingerprint, their iris or any other means of identification, the Citibank Australia CEO Roy Gori's said. It would also save time and money, Gori said, because it would cut out the traditional asking of questions for identification.
The Assam government in India will introduce biometric smart cards for beneficiaries in three districts of the state on a pilot basis in order to make the public distribution system more transparent and efficient. Assam food and civil supplies minister Nazrul Islam announced that the Centre has cleared a Rs 8-crore proposal submitted by the government to computerize the system in three districts. The new system will use iris scans and fingerprints as electronically preserved biometrics to have the individuals registered. These electronic records will be used to prepare ration cards and bar-coded coupons for beneficiaries. Under the scheme, the beneficiaries will be issued biometric ration cards in place of the existing ones. He said the pilot project would be implemented in Kamrup, Nagaon and Karbi Anglong districts. The biometric technology help to identify and remove duplicate registration of beneficiaries. It will also eradicate invalid ration cards.
The announcement came in the wake of widespread allegations that huge quantities of rice under various schemes meant to benefit people living below the poverty line are being diverted to the open market.
Venu Govindaraju and his students at the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors are developing ways to simulate handwritten CAPTCHA, the Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.
A Captcha is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer.
University at Buffalo computer scientist Venu Govindaraju, who, along with his UB colleagues, pioneered machine recognition of human handwriting, believes that this annoying 21st-century problem has a decidedly old-fashioned solution: handwriting.
"Here at UB's Center for Unified Biometrics, we're the only ones who have proposed and thoroughly studied handwritten CAPTCHAs," says Govindaraju. "Our perspective is that humans are good at reading handwriting, machines are not. It comes naturally to humans. But computer scientists typically consider handwriting a hopeless case, until someone comes along and shows them that it isn't."
Organizations have a much better chance of tracking and catching criminals if more cross-agency information is available to them. That is why the Army's Biometrics Identity Management Agency,(in short BIMA), which is tasked with coordinating biometrics efforts across the Defense Department, is expanding data-sharing capabilities with other government agencies and coalition partners.
The person we may collect biometrics on in [the war] theater today may be the same person who shows up in a U.S. airport wanting entry—and this has happened. Maybe he gives the same name, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he links back to a fingerprint that was found on an improvised explosive device. That’s certainly something you want to know before you let someone in the country.
The agency operates the department's premier biometrics database, and is coordinating with the departments of Justice, State and Homeland Security to share their biometrics data.
The Defense Department uses its Automated Biometrics Identification System (DOD ABIS) to process and store biometrics data; and Justice uses the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which includes fingerprints, criminal histories, aliases, mug shots, scar and tattoo photographs, and physical characteristics such as height, weight, and hair and eye color.
Combine data from each of these repositories, make it available to the participating agencies, and the possibilities expand a thousand-fold.
A Research and Markets report put computer peripheral equipment manufacturing in the US: at about 650 Companies with combined annual revenue of approximately $12 Billion. The computer peripheral equipment manufacturing industry in the US includes major companies include Lexmark (printers), Cogent and Bio-key International (biometrics), Logitech (based in Switzerland, producer of keyboards, mice, and peripherals), and divisions of larger manufacturers such as NCR and Diebold (point of sale equipment and ATMs). Peripheral equipment is also produced by large computer and electronics manufacturers such as Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell. The industry is highly concentrated: the top 50 companies account for more than 80 percent of revenue. The industry includes freestanding equipment such as ATMs and biometric devices, as well as ancillary equipment typically connected to computers such as keyboards, monitors, printers, mice, and Web cams. Some small electronic devices, such as digital cameras, are also included.
You can order the report here for € 93,-
The International Biometric and Identification Association (IBIA) has responded to the National Research Council (NRC) report, "Biometric Recognition: Challenges and Opportunities." where the NRC details biometric technologies as being inherently fallible and that society is not yet ready for the technology.
Among the chief concerns the IBIA has with the report is that it views biometric technologies as having an inherent weakness by being based on probabilistic results, however, the IBIA maintains that all identity systems are to some degree based off probabilistic results. Beyond simply disagreeing with the results, the IBIA also provides specific examples that refute some of the NRC's findings. Among the examples, the IBIA points to the abundance of embedded biometric sensors being found on laptops and increasing number of mobile devices proving that widespread acceptance is very possible.
The complete press announcement can be found here.
The WanderID service allows you to upload a photo of yourself, which can aid local authorities if they should ever have the need to determine who you are so they can alert your emergency contacts. The service is cloud-based and the team has a strong background in biometrics. The WanderID service is currently focused on face matching because of the easily ability for anyone to upload a photo. WanderID's Mary Haskett noted that there are people who have cognitive disabilities who may not be able to identify themselves. The team is focusing on this group plus all children with a focus on children with autism and/or Down syndrome. WanderID is currently available in central Texas at a cost of $10/month, $100/year or $250/lifetime. My guess is that the pricing model will be tweaked as WanderID adds more locations. The service is free for the local authorities. As long as they can get good distribution with local authorities, the idea of being able to identify easily a person in the case of an emergency is solid.
Watch the commercial Video here
Foreigners hoping to work in the Cayman Islands will soon have to give a range of bio-metric information to officials in order to enter the country.
Government plans to introduce a system that goes way beyond the anticipated finger printing which could include collecting palm prints, face and iris patterns, and even DNA for the purpose of identifying all work permit holders. This data will be held by the Immigration Department and will also be used by the police in conjunction with a new Automated Fingerprint Identification System. The plan to introduce of a new RCIPS finger print system and the immigration biometric enrolment was revealed with the publication of an invitation for bids on the Central Tender’s Committee website on Friday.
The RFP for this project can be found here
Biometrics Top the Shopping List
Fresh off of a trip to Machu Picchu, a pre-Columbian Incan site on a mountain ridge above the Urubamba Valley in Peru, Igor Saravia Aguilar is visiting KES 2010. Sarivia Aguilar is the General Manager of and he has travelled to Korea and the KES with his colleague Commercial Manager Jorge Cossio Medina, looking for ways to improve security in Peru. Korea IT Times was honoured to speak with them during a brief intermission in their quest to find the best that Korea has to offer in high tech solutions for reducing crime in cities across the Peruvian landscape.
Saravia Agular and Cossio Medina painted a picture of rampant crime in Peru. They compared the situation there with the troubles of neighboring Columbia. When we asked if the basis for the rising crime rate was drugs, as it is in Columbia, they replied by saying that drugs are always a part of the problem where crime in their region is concerned, but thievery, violence and extortion top the list in Peru. They said that the laws are very weak and that the criminals who are apprehended generally pay a fine and are back on the street to re-offend in a very short time.
Saravia Agular said that the Peruvian government has allocated $500 million USD to be spent on technical solutions between now and the end of this year and they have charged his company with the responsibility of defining the best use of these funds. The men from Peru are in the market for the best-in-breed biometric security systems
The road to long-term economic recovery lies in the nation’s ability to create innovative technologies that will result in tomorrow’s jobs. That was the philosophy behind President Obama’s call to make permanent for U.S. corporations a research and development tax credit that has been extended yearly since 1981. “I … believe that government should do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves,” Obama said in a September speech.
“And that means making the long-term investments in this country’s future that individuals and corporations can’t make on their own: investments in education and clean energy, in basic research and technology and infrastructure.”
The private sector needs incentives because companies don’t do “long-term” very well, said one industry technologist. Short-term pressures to make profits often force companies to be more risk averse.
It used to be the only way to start up a car was with that shiny key, but now there are other options. The most common alternative is pushing a button. Well if you’re not a fan of that route, now you can make sure you’re the only one that can start your car. Instead of pushing buttons or turning a key, you just have to put your pointer finger right up to that tiny scanner. If you’d like to allow a couple of other people to drive your car, you can have their fingerprints stored in the database. Should you have a thief that’s watched too many spy movies and cuts off your finger in order to use it for the car, they’ll still be hosed. After the fingerprint is confirmed it’ll then check for a pulse, blood pressure and body temperature, cut off fingers don’t have a pulse I’m afraid.
Paris, France, September 20 2010 - Safran (NYSE Euronext Paris: SAF) announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement with L-1 Identity Solutions (NYSE: ID), a leading identity management provider in the United States, for Safran to acquire the operating and holding company of L-1 and its biometric and enterprise access solutions, secure credentialing solutions and enrollment services businesses, for a total cash amount of USD 1.09 billion. These businesses had 2009 revenue of USD 436 million and recorded a backlog of USD 1.1 billion at end of 2009. The transaction would create an industry-leading provider of solutions for the fast-growing high-tech homeland security market and generate strong growth in revenue and earnings, while yielding significant operating synergies.
Prior to this agreement and as a condition to the transaction, L-1 entered into a definitive agreement to sell its government consulting services business for USD 295 million to a third party, and therefore this business would be excluded from the transaction with Safran.
Overview of the transaction
Under the terms of the agreement with L-1, Safran would acquire 100 % of L-1’s shares, with the following characteristics:
L-1 shareholders would receive USD 12.00 per L-1 share in cash, an implied premium of 31.2 % over L-1’s 30-day average closing price of USD 9.14 for the period ending on September 17 2010;
The estimated Enterprise Value of the business acquired by Safran is USD 1.19 billion, taking into account L-1’s estimated net debt at closing of approximately USD 100 million which includes the cash proceeds from the prior sale of the government consulting services business;
The run-rate operating cost synergies are expected to represent approximately USD 30 million, which would be fully realized within 18 months from the closing of the transaction;
The transaction, thanks to operating synergies, is expected to be accretive to Safran’s earnings from year one, excluding non cash and one-off items and purchase accounting adjustments (PPA);
Safran intends to fully finance the acquisition with existing cash on hand; and
The boards of directors of both L-1 and Safran have unanimously approved the transaction.
The importance of effective base security has been appreciated since long before Greek soldiers hid inside the giant horse they left as a gift at the gates of Troy. However, technology keeps changing the definition of effective. After a suicide bomber infiltrated a highsecurity U.S. military installation in Mosul, Iraq, killing 13 soldiers and eight others in a dining hall, the deputy secretary of Defense ordered the development and deployment of a biometric base access control system. In months, the Biometric Identification System for Access was serving bases in Iraq. BISA recorded a variety of biometrics of full-time, non-U.S. applicants for work and helped in distributing smart-card ID badges to those who were granted access.
Ears don't change shape, grow hair or wear disguises. They are the perfect means of identification.
The tubular crest that runs over the top of your ear is known as the helix. It's quite distinctive, even if it doesn't posses the pointy bit that proves you're descended from a monkey. Best of all, it doesn't change as you age, unlike the iris, which along with the face are the most popular means by which machines recognize humans. The problem with using ears (or any other feature, such as your fingerprint or even the way that you walk) for biometric security, is that first a computer must find and isolate the feature to be identified. That sounds like a simple problem only because humans do it so easily. Feature recognition is one of the biggest challenges of computer vision.
The French Immigration Ministry is to fingerprint Roma (Gypsies) who get financial aid after being deported. From Friday, biometric records will be created on Roma who receive up to 300 euros after they leave France. Most of them are repatriated to Bulgaria and Romania. Authorities say some expelled Roma make return trips to France to benefit several times from the humanitarian aid they get for going home.
Protection continues to be one of the great challenges of the 21st century, and the threats are only growing. I've already discussed some of the risks social media use poses, and much has been written on the fallibility of passwords. Could biometrics be the silver bullet?
Before we can answer that question, we need to set aside the common misconceptions people have about biometric technology, and start to view it as a valid option in today's business world. I spoke with John Trader, communications specialist at M2SYS Technology, for insight.
Thanks to gangster movies, cop shows and spy thrillers, people have come to think of fingerprints and other biometric means of identifying evildoers as being completely foolproof. In reality, they are not and never have been, and few engineers who design such screening tools have ever claimed them to be so. Yet the myth has persisted among the public at large and officialdom in particular. In the process, it has led—especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001—to a great deal of public money being squandered and, worse, to the fostering of a sense of security that is largely misplaced.
The downside is that biometric screening can also work without the user’s co-operation or even knowledge. Covert identification may be a boon when screening for terrorists or criminals, but it raises serious concerns for innocent individuals. Biometric identification can even invite violence. A motorist in Germany had a finger chopped off by thieves seeking to steal his exotic car, which used a fingerprint reader instead of a conventional door lock.
Another problem with biometrics is that the traits used for identification are not secret, but exposed for all and sundry to see. People leave fingerprints all over the place. Voices are recorded and faces photographed endlessly. Appearance and body language is captured on security cameras at every turn. Replacing misappropriated biometric traits is nowhere near as easy as issuing a replacement for a forgotten password or lost key. In addition, it is not all that difficult for impostors to subvert fingerprint readers and other biometric devices.
It could make the time-honoured tradition of taking the school register a thing of the past. Cutting-edge cameras are being used to scan children’s faces as they enter school.
The face-recognition technology makes sure they have turned up, records whether they were on time or late and keeps an accurate roll call. It can also deliver messages to pupils as they sign in.
Ten schools have started using the system, which is likely to be introduced elsewhere if considered a success. But privacy campaigners reacted angrily yesterday, warning that the technology was another ‘encroachment on civil liberties’.
Britons are already subjected to the greatest level of electronic surveillance in the world, with our movements said to be recorded in some way about 3,000 times a week. Facial recognition systems are in use in airports to catch those using fake passports. The faceREGISTER systems that are being installed in schools take 3D digital images of faces and infra-red scans. Pupils must face a box which is the size of an A3 piece of paper while their image is taken. They then punch in their four-digit pin on a number pad to confirm their identity. But Big Brother Watch campaign director Daniel Hamilton said: ‘This is another worrying development in the expansion of the surveillance state.
Watchful eye: Anyone arriving late at Sir Christopher Hatton School in Northamptonshire will have to make up the time at the end of the day
‘There is no need for schools to hold such sensitive information about their pupils. Such systems have limited benefits yet are wide open to abuse – from the risk of data theft to misuse by unscrupulous
SAB®, Spanish leading company in the manufacturing of biometric devices is drawing the new lines of business that open new European horizons. In this way, the company is making new business relationships with European authorized dealers.
SAB is an entirely Spanish company devoted to the research, manufacture and marketing of biometric solutions, using the most advanced techniques, such as the iris, the palm veins and fingerprint.Sociedad Avanzada de Biometría
(SAB®),provides solutions for access control, time and attendance, mobile biometrics and IT security. Its success lies in the design and development of biometric devices and software for secure environments for all sectors, using Bluetooth and Ethernet communication. As the main dealers for Spain and Portugal SAB counts with ADI Global International and EULEN SecurityMore information can be found on:
http://www.sabiometria.net/
Private snoopers are being paid to monitor thousands of CCTV cameras from home. Their job is to try to spot criminal behaviour on live feeds from cameras in stores and streets. If, for example, they see a shoplifter they send a text message warning the owner of the firm.
The company behind the idea, Internet Eyes, says it will help fight crime. But Daniel Hamilton, of campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: ‘It’s astonishing to think that innocent people doing their shopping could soon be spied on by an army of busybodies with an internet connection.
‘CCTV should be used sparingly to help solve real crimes, not to encourage this type of tawdry voyeurism.’The site is aimed at businesses that cannot afford security guards to watch their cameras 24 hours a day. The snoopers, each watching up to four screens at a time, will receive rewards of up to £1,000 when offenders are caught. Firms pay £20 a week for the service.
The scheme, which started on Monday, was granted approval by the Information Commissioner’s Office.
More info on: http://interneteyes.co.uk/
Founder and CEO of Australian security company TrustDefender, Ted Egan, told Computerworld Australia security offenders and hackers have become more sophisticated in recent years, using newer technologies such as cloud-based services. "The biggest issue enterprises have is that bad guys are not using traditional ways of evading security techniques," he said. "They are using sophisticated, virtualized, cloud-based attacks"
Australian IT managers are hesitant to move to biometrics as a security offering due to priorities taking precedent, Egan said this may be because it isn't an efficient means of securing a device. "The bad guys are very smart, all they have to do is compromise the device that biometrics has been used in," he said. "If the bad guys compromise that information in the first place, it doesn't matter what you do with biometrics or voice recognition -- they can still bypass all of it."
Egan's insights come as the former CIO of the US National Security Agency, Prescott Winter, warned CIOs needed to become more conscious of their internal security.
McAfee chief executive, David DeWalt, also pointed to Web 2.0 and social media as potential new security threats.
M& A activity continues at a fever pitch within the biometric industry. Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc., a leading National Security Solutions provider, announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire all of the outstanding stock of Henry Bros. Electronics, Inc. (HBE), a leading pure play provider of Homeland Security Solutions,
Products, and System Integration Services, including the design, engineering and operation of Command and Control Systems for the protection of Strategic Assets and Critical Infrastructure in the United States. HBE also has particular expertise in the design, engineering, and deployment of specialized surveillance, thermal imaging, analytics, radar, and biometrics technology based security systems.
The Certified Biometrics Professional (CBP) program is continuing to see growth and increased interest. The program has had candidates from both the public and private sector as well as candidates from all corners of the earth. "By the end of the year we should be somewhere around 400 candidates," said Richard Ringold with the IEEE Certified Biometrics Professional program. The program is also being seen by the industry as a positive step. "For one thing, it's a statement. It's saying that biometrics is a real profession, and that is something that we have lacked in the past& This actually proves that you have some base-level of the technology," said Catherine J. Tilton, vice president of standards and emerging technologies at Daon, who is also a Certified Biometrics Professional and helped develop some of the modules
Watch the Video
3M Co. has cleared a major hurdle in its $943 million bid to acquire Pasadena biometrics firm Cogent Inc., a developer of fingerprint and other biometrics devices. A Delaware Chancery Court on Tuesday denied a Cogent shareholder's motion to block the proposed acquisition of Cogent by 3M, citing the plaintiff's inability to show reasonable probability of success on the merits of any of the claims. 3M made the tender offer in August. But a number of shareholders have since hired attorneys to investigate whether the company's board breached its fiduciary duty to shareholders in agreeing to sell shares at $10.50
Nigeria's Cross River State is the first state in the country to implement biometric technology and combine authentication and payment in a statewide "Smartcity" card. The Smartcity card will be used by citizens for personal identification in public services such as tax declarations, healthcare, social benefits and pension, as well as enabling commercial services, such as ePayments. The card is delivered through the SmartGov Initiative, which allows the Cross River State to automate government services, create traceability and transparency of its systems and grow revenue.
According to Precise Biometrics (the suppliers of the ID technology), the state ID card program is the first of its kind in the world and a breakthrough for the company on the African continent. Precise Match-on-Card" matches and stores fingerprints on a smart card.
Passport and ID document scanning firm IDScan Biometrics has launched a Web site for its e age verification and marketing products for the leisure, bar and nightclub business. "The division of the business onto the websites&will allow us to define the two directions the business is taking," says Tamlyn Thompson, managing director of IDScan Biometrics. "Nightclub.co.uk showcases IDScan's leisure products such as SCAN-NET for age verification system and Cloakscan, a fingerprint operated coat check system; while Idscan.co.uk will drive our focus on retail fraud, passport control and identity card authentication." The company's ID and passport scanning systems use near infra-red, ultraviolet and smart card technology together with advanced character recognition to authenticate documents such as passports, visas, ID cards, driving licensees and work permits.
AuthenTec introduced a new mobile identity management software, TrueSuite® Mobile, designed specifically to enhance the features and functions of AuthenTec smart sensors in mobile phones. TrueSuite Mobile includes a newly simplified API designed specifically for the application developer community to facilitate biometric feature access and secure management of passwords and PINs.
Application development is simplified and streamlined through optimized user flows, behind the scenes control of a secure credential management system and a graphics engine supporting customized rapid user interface development. TrueSuite Mobile facilitates applications that allow users a more convenient method for logging in to their favorite mobile apps with the swipe of a finger, eliminating the need to type in user names and passwords or credit card information. TrueSuite Mobile also interfaces directly with AuthenTec's QuickSec VPN Client to enable one-touch, enterprise-class VPN security.
Call it the Tasmanian Angel or Big Brother but the Australia island and state is considering the use of fingerprint technology to track poker machine players to tackle problem gambling. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has promised to take action on problem gambling by 2014 as part of Labor's deal with Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie in return for his support to form a minority government.
However, chief executive officer of Mingara Leisure Group -- the parent organization of Port Macquarie's The Westport Club -- said a compulsory pre-commitment scheme such as the fingerprint option would have a "devastating impact" on clubs and the communities they serviced.
The prototype AOptix demonstrated at the Biometric Consortium Conference displayed the company's InSight SD with a dongled camera capable of capturing an ISO-standard face biometric at the same time as capturing the iris when standing at the two-meter distance from the device, says Joey Pritikin, product manager for AOptix Technologies. The company worked with Aware to integrate the AOptix iris capture system with Aware's face capture and universal registration client. "By leveraging the way that the InSight works and the tools that Aware brought, we were able to put the two modalities together in a very quick process that has really resulted in something that is a prototype but it works quite well," added Pritikin.
Watch the video:
IntraNexus, Inc., an innovator in hospital information systems, today announced that it has reached an agreement with HT Systems to integrate the PatientSecure biometric patient identification system into its SAPPHIRE hospital information systems suite.
“We believe PatientSecure is the future of how patients will be accurately identified across integrated delivery networks (IDNs) and we’re proud to be the first HIS vendor to fully integrate this technology with our SAPPHIRE Patient Access Manager and Advanced Clinical Manager solutions,” said Rick O’Pry, CEO of IntraNexus.
“PatientSecure virtually eliminates duplicate paperwork and answering sensitive identity questions each time a patient visits a different department of the hospital – this streamlined workflow is a perfect compliment to how SAPPHIRE performs for our clients.”
The integration of PatientSecure with IntraNexus’ SAPPHIRE solutions enables patients who have previously visited a registration area within the IDN to be instantly identified in the hospital’s SAPPHIRE Patient Access Manager or Advanced Clinical Manager system by simply placing their hand on the palm vein sensor device. Once the scan is complete, the patient’s medical record is automatically retrieved—decreasing the number of steps required to access a record and helping to ensure that the correct patient is matched with the correct record.
Aadhaar is a 12-digit unique number, which will be issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to all residents of the country
The main criticism of the UID is based on privacy concerns. The project is criticized because, unlike Western countries, India is not known for stringent data protection laws and the opposing group fears data theft and selling of the vital information to a third party by corrupt officials. Apart from this, they argue, it's an individual's right to protect his or her privacy from any unlawful interference, even by the state. Article 21 of the Constitution, the Hindu Marriage Act, the Copyright Act, Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000 and the Code of Criminal Procedure all place some form of restrictions on the release of personal information.
Mahatma Gandhi Called the ID cards issued to Indians in South Africa the Black Act and burned them in public. The question is:
Is Aadhaar going to be the Black Act differentiating between the Haves and Have nots ?
No educated or well of people in India will register for Aadhaar, will they ?
Watch the videoclip:
With barely 24 hours to go before the first set of ‘Aadhaar numbers' are handed out in Maharashtra, a group of academics, jurists, activists and film makers have raised their voices against the UID project.
They are flagging concerns on issues of privacy, potential for misuse of information, and “limited public discussion on implications and fall-out” of the UID project.
The campaigners are demanding the project be halted for now, a feasibility study undertaken, constitutional aspects debated, and a cost-benefit analysis conducted for the mega project. “The law on privacy needs to be worked on, urgently. A project with such a wide implication cannot be undertaken without a debate in Parliament and civil society,” Mr Justice A.P. Shah, Retired Chief Justice of High Court of Delhi said at a conference.
One of the main grouse of the campaigners is the privacy aspect – the signatories contend that the information which is today scattered across diverse databases can now be linked to the UID number, and potentially thus lead to convergence of all kinds of personal details including medical and financial information. The database, they fear, could be hacked into and misused.
“What if the information lands up in wrong hands…There is clearly a need for a wide debate on the protection of privacy. Besides, the information can lead to profiling and tracking of residents by the State,” Ms Ghosh said.
However, the campaigners are not yet exploring legal options. Approaching the courts would be the last resort for them and the focus currently is on raising a debate on the issue, they say.
You Tube Clip - Speakers - Usha Ramanathan, Uma Chakravarthi, Sohini Ghosh, Bezwada Wilson, Justice A.P.Shah, Reetika Khera, Nikhil Dey, Prof. Jagdeep S. Chokkar, Praful Bidwai, Amar Kanwar
Watch the video clip:
UID Debate on IBN Live - "Does the UID Scheme violate democratic rights? " --Usha Ramanathan, Independent Law Resercher, Ramesh Ramanathan- Founder Janaagraha, Kiran Karnic - Former Chief, Nasscom, Samar Halarnkar- Managing Editor, Hindustan Times.
Watch the video clip :
CNN has been researching how news articles are shared through social media, identifying different motivations for sharing and the increased benefit for advertisers who feature on recommended news pages.
The 'Pownar' research was conducted over two months with 2,300 consumers using tracking and surveying. It also used eye tracking and biometrics to measure readers' engagement with stories. The most influential news-sharers, and the group which shared 87 percent of the stories in the survey, only accounted for 27 percent of all the users - tallying with previous definitions of a minority of highly active Web users that contribute a majority of content online.
The big social networks - Facebook Twitter, YouTube and MySpace, accounted for 43 percent of all links shared, email 30 percent, SMS 15 percent and instant messenger 12 percent.
This is the second piece of research by CNN in this area after the 'grapevine' report published last month, which explored how news spreads through word of mouth.
GunVault's MicroBioVault was recently honored as "Safety Product of the Year" by the Shooting Industry Academy of Excellence. The MicroBioVault's notebook-style design allows one to securely transport a handgun or valuables. The MicroBioVault uses biometrics, specifically fingerprint recognition, to access the safe contents faster and more securely than ever before. A high-performance algorithm is used to achieve speedy identification of enrolled fingerprints and at the same time has a very low False Reject Rate (FRR). The system can handle up to 60 fingerprint templates.
Businesses must improve their contact center operations to deal with angry post-recession customers, according to a report. They will have to consider voice biometrics and ensure consistent service across social media to make sure customer demands are met, said the report by Contact Centre Babel, the customer-service research group. Voice biometrics of customers can be stored to enable customers to verify who they are, meaning they don't have to repeat memorable dates or other information, and helping contact centers to deal with customers quicker, it said.
In addition, multimedia blending can enable call center agents to handle both email and telephony together, instead of dealing with the two in isolation, again enabling quicker response times. The "5 Steps to Serving the Post-Recession Customer" report, commissioned by contact center solutions providers Datapoint and Genesys, said the recession has caused customers to become even more demanding.
Download the report (after registration) on:
http://event-info.co.uk/datapointgenesys/
Online banking cannot deliver both convenience and security, according to Telstra and Australia's banks. At the AIIA Mobility Innovation in Financial Services event, representatives from Telstra, banks and insurance sector discussed the proliferation of mobile devices and what it means for delivery and banking services. One of the biggest inhibitors of people signing up to online banking is reservations over security, according to National Australian Bank (NAB) online banking general manager, Chris Smith. Authentication measures, while adding extra steps to online banking, will play a key part in alleviating such fears, he said.
“Everybody has in mind this Holy Grail of being able to do a single-factor biomentric authentication,” he said. “That is not going to happen real soon because just about every biometric system is relatively repeatable fairly easily.
” Bradlow recounted how his Telstra team overcame a purportedly effective biometrics system to highlight his point.
“We got one of those fingerprint scanners that was supposed to be Russian Mafia-proof, that is, if somebody cuts off your thumb, it’s not supposed to work,” he said. “My guys defeated it using $2 worth of equipment to successfully lift a fingerprint off a glass and use it.
Houston's 1,200-room Hilton is an early adopter of using facial recognition technology to improve hotel security and customer service. The Hilton Americas-Houston - Houston's biggest hotel - has installed an innovative digital video system that relies on facial recognition technology. The system will let managers track employees, locate missing suitcases, recognize a VIP guest -- and much more. The system - said to be 90 percent accurate in recognizing people and objects -- will let the hotel track goings-on throughout the property using search functions that can track faces and objects by color and size.
Like it when a hotel front-desk clerk greets you by name? Well, then you might like this. "Another aspect of the system that Hilton Americas-Houston feels will be useful is its ability to recognize repeat customers," the release says. Moore says that they'll tie in the system with its front-office systems to "flag our Gold Card members in order to be able to blow them away with service."
The hotel says the system can aid customers who've reported an item has gone missing inside the hotel somehow. The system can locate items using its color, directional and object search capabilities. For example, if a customer's suitcase was lost, the hotel says it will be now be able to locate it almost instantly by following the luggage piece using a search based on color and object from the time it entered the hotel through to its present location, the release says. In this hotel alone, more than 7,000 items are reported missing each year.
In Bangalore, a private company has made a device, which, it claims, can curb the practice of impersonation during examinations. MeritTrac Services launched a biometric authentication device, AuthenTrac. All the candidates' photographs are uploaded in a central system. The system then transfers the information to wireless biometric devices. These devices are dispatched to the exam centers. The invigilators take the device to the exam hall. They enter the candidate's ID into it and take the candidate's photograph from it. The device then matches the photo in the registration form with that taken in the exam hall. The device takes candidates' biometric fingerprints for attendance too. After the exam, the biometrics information from AuthenTrac, would be uploaded to the central software. Candidates' fingerprints would be verified at the time of counseling too.
Did their voices betray them? The discovery of an alleged terror plot against Europe owes at least some of its success to "voiceprint" technology that allows law enforcement to electronically match a voice to its owner.
The technique - which some compare to fingerprinting – can be a powerful anti-terror tool, officials increasingly believe. Law enforcement agencies are already considering how a voice database could help thwart future plots.
The suspected plot against European cities in which suspects allegedly spoke of a Mumbai-style shooting spree has triggered travel warnings and refocused attention on al-Qaeda activities on the Pakistan- Afghanistan border, where several suspects' voices were recorded.
The British eavesdropping agency GCHQ deployed voice identification software to help uncover the plot that officials say has targeted Germany, Britain and France. "Advances in these types of technology have been key in thwarting plots and catching suspects," a British government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of his work.
The Los Angeles Unified School District is pushing a plan to fingerprint some students before they can get their lunches. Critics say the plan to biometrically identify students could lead to civil rights violations, but the district insists a cashless food system would pose no security or privacy risks.
Superintendent Ramon Cortines says struggling students who receive free lunches would no longer have to pay with embarrassing tickets. The plan is also designed to save money while speeding up long lines. As the nation’s second-larges district, the LAUSD serves more than 500,000 meals a day.
Watch the video:
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano confirmed today that Secure Communities, a program that provides federal immigration officials with fingerprint data from local police, is mandatory for local jurisdictions. “We don’t consider Secure Communities an opt in/opt out program,” Napolitano said, according to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman.Her statement was official confirmation of news The Washington Post broke last week: Despite allowing local communities to believe they could opt out of sharing fingerprints with ICE, DHS actually set up the program to go over their heads to get the information directly from the FBI. Local law enforcement agencies share fingerprints of those they arrest with the FBI to detect fugitives. Some, though, do not want to share this information with immigration enforcement.
Four communities — Washington, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Calif., and Arlington, Va. — have so far attempted to opt out of Secure Communities, arguing the program can damage trust in police and threaten public safety. This is a marked change from previous statements from ICE and Napolitano herself. ICE laid out a process for opting out of the program in an August document called “Setting the Record Straight,” writing that communities could be removed from the “deployment plan” after meeting with state officials and ICE.
From the US to India, governments are looking to biometric technology, which uses scans of fingerprints, irises and other unique features, to weed out illegal immigrants and terrorists and create national identification databases. Yet extensive use of the technology, from a $4bn industry that is growing at an estimated rate of 20 per cent a year, by governments and private industry could be premature, according to a report by the National Research Council, a US research group. The report draws a distinction between the flawless image of biometric technology presented by spy thrillers and futuristic Hollywood blockbusters and reality. It says more research into performance and robustness of biometric systems is needed and that many questions remain about whether the technology is the most appropriate solution for the many concerns it is meant to address – from homeland security to the protection of proprietary data in the private sector. It said that while biometric systems performed well in many applications, the capabilities and limitations were not yet well understood in applications involving tens of millions of users. In particular, the report said too little was known about the individuality of biometric traits and their long and short-term physiological and pathological variability. Understanding these and other scientific questions would require extensive data collection.
What is needed today to solve the problems of the poor is not so much esoteric technology but first and foremost clear logic as to where the problems lie. Most poor get deprived of what they should get because of corruption, and not lack of identity
The UID programme has been launched without any legal and constitutional sanction for it as yet. In the name of the poor, a huge amount of money is being spent. And, in spite of severe criticism from rights organisations including warnings by eminent academicians such as Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, no action of reviewing the project has been taken. The main argument of the UID that it will help plug leakages in NREGA and PDS is fallacious. It is not that the workers don't have a form of identification. They do have a job card. Their work does not fetch them anything unless their attendance is marked, and for that they have to depend on the supervisor. And the supervisor asks a bribe for it. UID or for that matter no amount of identification can solve this problem.
Scientists working on biometrics at the University of Southampton have found a way to identify ears with a success rate of almost 100 per cent. In a paper entitled A Novel Ray Analogy for Enrolment of Ear Biometrics just presented at the IEEE Fourth International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems, scientists from the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) described how a technique called the image ray transform can highlight tubular structures such as ears, making it possible to identify them.
Biometrics is the newest and most advanced technology available today for obtaining fingerprints. We are privileged to be able to use the same equipment presently used by Federal Agencies, Law Enforcement, and the US Military. Law Enforcement know that time is critical in the recovery of a missing child. The Biometric Technology our program brings to parents allows their child’s fingerprints to be immediately submitted into the FBI Database as soon as they are reported missing. When the child’s fingerprints are entered into the FBI Database, the fingerprints become immediately available to all law enforcement agencies throughout the United States.
Also Announces Agreement for Sale of L-1 Intelli-gence Services Businesses to BAE Systems, Inc. Prior to Closing of the Safran Transaction
STAMFORD, Conn.-- L-1 Identity Solutions announced today that it has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Safran in a merger transaction providing for stockholders to receive $12.00 per share in cash, for an aggregate enterprise value of approximately $1.6 billion, inclusive of outstanding debt. The per share consideration of $12.00 incorporates the purchase price to be received pursuant to the sale of the L-1 intelligence services businesses as described below. The per share price represents a premium of 24 percent over L-1's closing stock price on the NYSE on September 17, 2010 and a premium of 66 percent over the closing stock price on January 5, 2010, the day prior to L-1's announcement of its strategic alternatives review process.
General Services Administration officials are considering holding another competition for a contract related to Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12 , a Bush-era mandate to improve security and reduce identity fraud, according to a new report.
The contract for HSPD-12 services should be recompeted because it didn’t fully comply with acquisition policy, GSA’s inspector general wrote in a report issued Sept. 13. HSPD-12 establishes a mandatory, government wide standard for secure and reliable forms of identification for federal employees and contractors. GSA is the lead agency on the program. Under the current structure of the HSPD-12 contract, GSA’s managed service office violated the agency’s policy by exceeding the contract’s ceiling, the report stated. With a recompete, officials are considering options that include having customers buying and being billed directly. It would relieve the office in charge of HSPD-12 of managing funds, the report said.
The U.S. military is taking cloud computing into rugged terrain in Afghanistan, where according to Lt. Gen. Richard Zahner, the basic hardware and software technology is being packed into mobile boxes that later this year will start to play a key role in networking for soldiers in the sky and on the ground. "We now have a government-owned cloud set," said Lt. Gen. Zahner during his keynote address at the Biometric Consortium Conference here. "We're leveraging cloud technology where it's needed." The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) makes use of private cloud computing in the United States for the benefit of the military, for instance in a data center run by HP. But this is the first time that military-run cloud computing has gone to Afghanistan, where warfighters in the field may depend on it for critical surveillance and decision-making information via secure networks.
BIO-key TruDonor biometric identification technology has been deployed by the Institute for Transfusion Medicine, through its LifeSource and Central Blood Bank business units.
ITxM, the nation's third-largest independent blood center, with TruDonor biometric identification, will automate and reduce to second donor and patient registration, while reducing data entry and duplicate donor errors and enhancing blood donor convenience and security.
"We are extremely excited about our partnership with BIO-key. We are transitioning to a paperless collections process, which will allow us to reduce costs and be more nimble in our interactions with donors and patients," Eric Schulties, vice president and chief information officer of ITxM, said in a recent press release. Schulties continued, "The technology provided by BIO-key brings us closer to our donors and patients, enabling us to spend more time inter-acting over their health and safety than trying to find and positively match a person to the right medical record. It was critical that BIO-key allows us to search for, not just positively identify, a person, so the registration experience is streamlined, simple and more secure."
Scanning prisoners’ irises is just Step 1. In Afghanistan, local and NATO forces are amassing biometric dossiers on hundreds of thousands of cops, crooks, soldiers, insurgents and ordinary citizens. And now, with NATO’s backing, the Kabul government is putting together a plan to issue biometrically backed identification cards to 1.65 million Afghans by next May.
The idea is to hinder militant movement around the country, and to keep Taliban infiltrators out of the army, NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan commander Lt. Gen. William Caldwell tells Danger Room. ―The system allows the Afghans to thoroughly screen applicants and recruits for any potential negative past history or criminal linkages, while at the same time it provides an additional measure of security at checkpoints and major facilities to prevent possible entrance and access by malign actors in Afghanistan,‖ Caldwell e-mails. It’s a high-tech upgrade to a classic counterinsurgency move — simultaneously taking a census of the population, culling security forces of double agents and cutting off guerrilla routes. (Plus, bombs and weapons can be swabbed for fingerprints to build files on insurgent suspects.) Gen. David Petraeus, now commander of the Afghan war effort, relied heavily on biometrics during his time in command of U.S. forces in Iraq. Twenty to 25 Afghans a week are currently caught in the biometric sweep, military officials estimate. That number could grow significantly in the months to come. The ―population registration division‖ of Afghanistan’s Ministry of Interior is ―embarking on a program to develop, print and distribute biometrically enabled national ID cards,‖ e-mails Col. Craig Osbourne, the director of NATO’s Task Force Biomet-rics.
DHS prototype designed to detect 'fidget factor' of possible terrorists
Fingerprinting air passengers entering the United States is one counter-terrorism method used today . But the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has another idea in the works: a behavioral biometrics monitoring system that gauges small changes in a person's body, dubbed the "fidget factor," especially in answer to a question such as "Do you intend to cause harm to America?"
DHS has actually developed a prototype for putting subjects on a monitoring pad next to a battery of remote-sensing equipment that can very quickly measure ocular changes, heart and respiration rates and even slight changes in the skin's thermal properties as a way to detect suspicious behavior. Dr. Starnes Walker, director of the research, science and technology directorate at the DHS, discussed the effort during a keynote address at this week's Biometric Consortium Conference in Tampa. There's no specific timeframe to officially introduce the technology for real-world use, said Dr. Sharla Rausch, director of science and technology, human factors, in the behavioral sciences division at DHS, which has the mission of advancing national security and countering terrorism through study and application of social, behavioral and physical sciences, including biometrics.
Watch the video on FAST here.
Canada Immigration has announced a new five-year plan to institute a secure, biometrics-based border entry system to protect the nation from illegal immigrants. According to Karen Shadd, spokeswoman for the federal immigration office, Visa applicants in Canada will be required to provide biometric information in the form of fingerprints and a photograph to ac-quire a digital Visa, the Canadian Visa Bureau reports. Shadd told the news source, "biometric verification significantly reduces the chance that one individual could pose as or be mistaken for another individual. Biometrics will bolster Canada’s existing measures to reduce identity fraud and enhance the safety and security of Canadians." According to the Toronto Sun, the new program, which could show dividends as early as next year, will put Canada's border security in line with other nations such as the United States and UK.
Several weeks ago, Lynn Penedo's condominium association installed an electronic finger-print-scanning device outside her building's multimillion-dollar community clubhouse. Now she refuses to use it because she fears identity theft.
"I believe that is a violation of my privacy to give a fingerprint to keep on file for entering the clubhouse now, and if ever, my condo building," said Penedo, an owner and resident of International Village of Inverrary in Lauderhill, a community of 832 condo units. She also worries about her own security: "Once someone gets your fingerprint, you can't change it if they steal your identity."
Penedo's self-imposed ban is quite a sacrifice, considering the clubhouse features an indoor pool, two spas, racquetball courts and pool tables.
The Boston Police Department should end its participation in a federal program that automatically checks the immigration status of people who are arrested because the practice is discouraging legal and illegal immigrants from cooperating with police, immigrant advocates say.
Patricia Montes, executive director of Centro Presente, a Somerville-based immigrant advocacy group, said some immigrants are refusing to report crimes to Boston police be-cause they fear police may instead check their immigration status.
But Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said Tuesday that the city’s immigrants, regardless of status, have nothing to worry about if they are not being arrested. He said the checks are not used to enforce federal immigration laws but to identify criminals wanted by federal authorities.
360 Biometrics added Meru Cab Company Pvt. Ltd. to its growing roster of clients. Recently, the Silicon Valley firm helped Meru Cab Company successfully integrate the 360 Biometrics' PersonID platform with their Oracle Siebel CRM software, which is used to manage the entire life cycle of its cab drivers, including recruitment and training. The 360 Biometrics' PersonID is a Web-based fingerprint identification solution that identifies people using their fingerprints. As part of the company's Web biometrics platform, it can function as a stand-alone system or can be quickly integrated into any Web-based applications. The state-of-the-art PersonID system is helping Meru Cab Company resolve a significant business issue: authenticating the identity of its 5,000-plus drivers. To ensure high quality customer service, the company terminates agreements with and blacklists cab drivers who make serious violations of certain policies or customer service standards.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that the agency is using a federal information sharing capability based on biometrics in all Texas counties. This information sharing capability is part of Secure Communities—ICE’s comprehensive strategy to improve and modernize the identification and removal of any alien convicted of a crime from the United States.
This capability is part of ICE's comprehensive strategy to improve and modernize the identification and removal of aliens convicted of a crime from the United States. Formerly, when people were arrested for a crime, their fingerprints were checked for criminal history information only against the biometric database maintained by the FBI. With the implementation of Secure Communities, this fingerprint information is now automatically and simultaneously checked against both the FBI criminal history records and the biometrics-based immigration records maintained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
THANKS to gangster movies, cop shows and spy thrillers, people have come to think of fingerprints and other biometric means of identifying evildoers as being completely foolproof. In reality, they are not and never have been, and few engineers who design such screening tools have ever claimed them to be so. Yet the myth has persisted among the public at large and officialdom in particular. In the process, it has led—especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001—to a great deal of public money being squandered and, worse, to the fostering of a sense of security that is largely misplaced.
A panel of scientists, engineers and legal experts who carried out the study concludes that biometric recognition is not only --inherently fallible-- but also in dire need of some fundamental research on the biological underpinnings of human distinctiveness. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are paying for studies of better screening methods, but no one seems to be doing fundamental research on whether the physical or behavioral characteristics such technologies seek to measure are truly reliable, and how they change with age, disease, stress and other factors.
You can download this 5 year study (for free) on:
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12720&page=R1
In sub-Saharan Africa, individuals living in rural areas have few ways to access banks. Currently, less than 10 percent of people in the region have bank or savings accounts. Opportunity International is working to solve that problem through a system of kiosks, smartcards and biometrics. In the past, individuals living in rural Malawi would travel for hours, even days to access banks. To remove that problem, Opportunity International has set up a number of kiosks, check-in centers and ATMs around the country to help people gain access to banking.
As of June 2010, the service had reached 284,622 people, saving a combined $32 million. This allowed approximately $30 million to be given in loans that can increase quality of life and help the region develop.
Password elimination strategies that can both strengthen data security and lower operational costs will be the topic of a free 45-minute webinar co-hosted by Fujitsu and Passlogix at 11:30 am Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday October 14. . Registration is available here.
The session, called "Protecting Your Company's Data & Avoiding Unauthorized Access," will address the benefits of deploying enterprise single sign-on (ESSO) technology in conjunction with PalmSecure" palm vein biometric authentication to close the security gaps and reduce the help desk costs associated with requiring end users to manage different passwords for each enterprise application, database or account they need to do their jobs.
A recent Apple patent and a strongly worded report from the National Research Council suggest that the future of biometrics lies with personalization, not security. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently granted Apple a patent for biometric-sensor handheld devices that recognize a user by the image of his or her hand. In the not-too-distant future, anyone in the house could pick up an iOS device -- or a remote control or camera -- and have personalized settings queued up just for him or her.
Simage Technologies provides a 'converged' platform for payments and ID. The platform can be used for mobile payments, contactless payments and contact based payments. This gives a high level of flexibility to the service providers as multiple devices can be issued to the end-users depending on the targeted segments, which allows for better service penetration in the market. It allows the service providers to introduce new services and offer a dynamic service portfolio in the market. Multiple biometrics verification like vein scan, fingerprint scan, facial recognition, and iris scan can be easily incorporated depending on the service provider requirements.
VoiceVault, a developer of voice-based biometric solutions, has announced its voice biometric Smartphone Developer Program for VoiceVault Enterprise.
The program, which offers support for Android, iPhone and Blackberry operating systems, is designed to help smart phone application developers include voice-biometrics in their programs by providing tools and resources to assist the developers in utilizing the VoiceVault Enterprise technology
This future phone has an intuitive user interface without doubt including some sort of Biometric authentication. These devices will respond to grip and other forms of user action, all very intuitive and apparently independent of weather conditions according to the picture below.
RCG Holdings (RCG) offers a vast service of products and solutions, including RFID-enabled asset management systems, machine to machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. It has developed an intelligent surveillance system using facial recognition technology called Fx Guard Windows Logon, which has been adopted by international computer manufacturers like Acer and NEC.
Don’t like the idea of a government or corporation tracking your mug around the Web or the real world? Alex Kilpatrick offers a few tips to foil facial recognition software used by those who would monitor your whereabouts: Don’t bother growing a beard, or wearing a hat. Instead, invest in a pair of oversize Gucci knockoffs.
"Outside of a warrant, I don't want to be tracked, whether it's a government or a store," he says. " So I think you have a moral obligation to mess with these surveillance techniques short of breaking the law." For instance, while normal glasses did not stymie the software, large dark glasses made the subject completely unrecognizable. "The simplest way to defeat the software is to wear a good pair of sunglasses," he says. Kilpatrick knows something about the growing power of technology to track individuals. He has sold facial recognition software to the military for security purposes and founded Tactical Information Systems, a startup that hosts a cloud-based biometric platform.
In malls throughout Japan, billboards are being installed that use biometrics to determine what demographic a viewer fits within, and show an appropriate advertisement. The first thing the billboard determines on a passerby is gender. Currently, the biometric scanners are capable of determining whether one is male or female with 85 to 90 percent accuracy, the Guardian reports. The advertising machines are also capable of determining the approximate age and ethnicity of shoppers. While current billboards are restricted to biometric data, the software does have the potential to expand its reach. Because certain facial features do not change with age or even surgery, scanners can accurately identify individuals and advertise to their specific preferences.
Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the news source, "we [consumers] don't expect the billboard to look back at us, but that is exactly what is happening now. Companies are increasingly impatient to get to us, and once these practices are commonplace it will be hard to reverse them."
Cross Match Technologies, Inc., a global provider of biometric identity solutions, was selected as a winner of an ASIS International Accolades award for product innovation for its SEEK® II, Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit. The award will be presented during the ASIS International 56th Annual Seminar and Exhibition running October 12-15 at the Dallas Convention Center in Dallas, Texas. SEEK II is a multimodal mobile device that combines dual iris scan capability, high-quality fingerprint capture, and rapid facial capture technology. The system is compact and portable for rugged field use in bright sunlight and adverse conditions -- making it quick and easy for users to identify subjects and verify their identities.
UIDAI is trying to create a ‘unique’ database through its ambitious UID number project. But state governments planning to tag numerous details to the UID number and allowing other entities access to the system could leave the database vulnerable to misuse
The UIDAI), the agency assigned with the task of giving a unique identification (UID) to every resident in the country is faced with a situation. Already, some state governments are seeking to add multiple dimensions to the UID number, raising a question mark on the nature and security of the UIDAI database. Now the UIDAI has opened a can of worms by agreeing to allow access to registrars, like state governments and banks, as well as insurers who will collect individual data for the authority through their know-your-customer (KYC) database. This means that any company may be able to access the huge database (of about 60 crore people expected by the end of 2015) simply by becoming a 'registrar' and using the data for their marketing initiatives. Also, the registrar, whether it is a bank or an insurer, could make it mandatory for customers to have a UID number if they want to continue to receive services.
An IT expert pointed out that such projects could not be run with just one person in control, for how will anybody know whether the system is not being misused? There is a need for implementable laws to check any misuse and this is a flaw with the UIDAI project.
Turner Construction Co. has landed a $142 million contract to build a Biometrics Technology Center at the FBI complex in Clarksburg. West Virginia's congressional delegation announced the award Thursday. The 360,000 square-foot, four-story building will nearly double the size of the Criminal Justices Information Services Division. When finished, it will accommodate nearly 2,000 employees. The current facility already houses 2,500 employees.
U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller says the expansion lets the FBI and the Department of Defense create new, good-paying jobs for West Virginia and builds on the state's growing biometrics industry.
HCL Technologies, an IT solutions developer, has announced the launch of its biometric airport security solution that would help speed up the movement of pilots and flight crew through security checkpoints. The new solution, called AeroPASS, was developed with biometrics developer Daon Trusted Identity Services as well as airline communications company AvFinity.
The AeroPass system does not store biometric information itself, but rather on a credential that airline employees would be issued with their enrolled biometric data. On top of the operation of the system, HCL is touting the system as meeting the standards of the Biometric Airport Security Identification Consortium as well as the Transportation Security Administration's rapid-access biometric systems regulations.
The AeroPASS solution embraces the standards of the Biometric Airport Security Identification Consortium (BASIC). The BASIC consortium goal is to bolster airport security through a framework that provides the nation's airports with a biometric-enabled access control system for its tenants, including airline personnel. Consistent with BASIC, the AeroPASS solution enables airline crew to assert their identity within the nation's airports, based on U.S. government's FIPS 201 credentials for federal employees and contractors.
The EBF is delighted to announce the 6th EBF Research Seminar which will take place on Thursday, the 4th of November 2010 at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Brussels. The Seminar will focus on ‘International Data Sharing’. Expert speakers at the event include Mr Joaquim Nunes de Almeidam, Head of Unit, DG Home Affairs, Dr Reinhard Schmid, Federal Ministry of the Interior, Austria and Mr Mark Branchflower, Interpol.
The event will examine how policy makers and the users of large biometric systems can maximise the benefits of the exchange of biometric and other data while keeping in harmony with European principles on data protection and privacy. The Seminar will also look at commercial and private applications of biometrics and related date exchange issues.
The Seminar will also hear presentations from the three finalists of the EBF European Biometrics Research Award 2010. The Award, now in its fifth year, is made annually to an individual who has been judged by a panel of internationally respected experts, to be making a significant contribution to the field of biometrics research in Europe as evidenced by the submission of a research paper and delivery of a presentation.
The Chairman of the EBF European Biometrics Research Award 2010 is Mr Gustav Kalbe, Acting Head of Unit - Trust & Security, DG INFSO, European Commission. For more information about the award please visit the EBF website: www.eubiometricsforum.com
European Union nations hope to foster meaningful debate on ethics by showing people pop culture and Sci-Fi inspired videos and getting them to comment on an open forum on the internet. The Technolife Project seeks to understand how the world feels about three key emerging technologies: biometrics, human enhancement, and global mapping.
Funded as part of the EU's FP7 Program, the project's team is composed of ethicists, scientists, computer programmers and other professionals across several institutions led by the University of Bergen in Norway. To inspire the debates, Technolife has created "imagined communities," scenarios that embody the possible applications of the technology in question.
To register for the Technolife Biometrics debate please go to:
http://biometrics.kertechno.net/
Hewlett Packard (HP) India expects to double the revenue it gets from the government vertical in the next three-five years, especially in power, education and utilities. The company has its sight trained on defense, security and e-governance, and expects to sign deals for these. At present, HP India gets 20-25 per cent of its revenue from the government. HP is a part of one of the consortia that will offer biometrics solutions to the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), to collect demographic and biometric details of the residents of the country. It is a partner of the consortia headed by L-I Identity Solutions. HP India Sales is providing it with middleware and hardware.
"The doubling of revenue will mainly come from defense, security, railways and opportunities in the goods and services tax spaces. Going ahead, we see the government to be both revenue and growth driver for HP India," said Durgadutt Nedungadi, director-sales, enterprise business, HP India.
Biometric security is obtrusive--unless it's on all the time, analyzing your gait.
Your smart phone is a hideous liability that renders you increasingly vulnerable to a host of fraudulent activities--everything from identity theft to the emptying of your bank accounts--every day. Right now phones are stolen because they're valuable, but if you think about it, the data they contain--which will only become more lucrative once we're using them as electronic wallets--is worth far more. The problem is that unlike your bank's website, you use your phone throughout the day, which makes tapping in a password over and over again so impractical that few users bother to lock their phones in this way. The solution is biometrics--imagine phones with a fingerprint scanner--and the best kind operate transparently. So-called passive biometrics know who you are based on things you're doing all the time anyway.
Privacy and security clash as DHS tests iris scans at the Border Patrol. But Big Brother in India starts iris scans, fingerprinting and facial recognition photos for 1.2 billion residents.
DHS will start iris scans at the Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, and claims it will destroy all biometric and biographic data at the conclusion of the project to track illegal aliens.
Although this Big Brother biometric type of monitoring sends privacy invasion chills up my spine, it is nothing when compared to the massive and chilling Big Brother biometric scenario kicking off in India this month. As reported by the government of India, 1.2 billion unique identification numbers (UID) will be given out to India's residents. The 12-digit unique number, called Aadhaar, will be issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), stored in a centralized database and linked to "basic demographics and biometric information" – a photograph, ten fingerprints and both irises scanned of each individual. 440 million Indians are below the poverty level and the UID is supposed to improve their situations.
Biometrics are being used more frequently on campus for access to high-security areas, says David Stallsmith, director of product marketing at ColorID. Data centres, animal labs and for securing nuclear material used in medical facilities are the areas where two-factor authentication, a card and biometric, are being used. Stallsmith also says that the “ick” factor around biometrics is declining as campuses and individuals realize that the identification technology offers greater security. As for modalities, iris is growing in popularity and fingerprint is also popular.
When a roadside bomb goes off outside of Baghdad, investigators may look for fingerprints. If they find one, they may be able to check it against an enormous database of biometric information that the United States started collecting after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. "If you can identify who it is that built the roadside bomb, that's a tremendous advantage," Jim Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told PRI's The World.
The organization helped the Pentagon research the use of biometric data in counterterrorism. He explained: It doesn't always work, and sometimes there's a little bit of luck involved. But it's a way to figure out who are the guys that make the suicide vests, who are the guys that are making the roadside bombs. And getting them to stop doing what they're doing is really a big help. The pentagon now has biometric information about nearly 7 percent of Iraq's 29 million people, according to the Boston Globe, including "their names, facial scans, and often other details about them, such as whether they were considered a friend or foe."
At a time when the assets under management (AUM) of mutual fund companies are dwindling rapidly, market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India's (SEBI) tough stand on in-person verification of distributors may just tighten the noose around the struggling mutual fund industry.
The new know-your-distributor (KYD) requirements have not gone down too well with some distributors, who question the extent of verification as demanded by SEBI. The KYD requirements have been introduced by the Association of Mutual Funds in India (AMFI) under SEBI's diktat. It is mandatory to comply with the KYD procedure (with effect from 1 September 2010) before applying for fresh ARN Registration/ARN Renewal. Existing ARN holders are required to comply with KYD norms by the end of February 2011, failing which payment of commission will be suspended till ARN holders comply with KYD requirements.
Concerned at the rising number of accidents and deaths on its roads, Haryana Saturday enounced a stricter licensing system to ensure that more skilled drivers are behind the wheel. 'The new licensing system will raise the bar through standardized theoretical and practical tests and prepare an all-embracing and easy-to-access manual for the drivers,' Home Secretary Krishna Mohan said Saturday. About 4,500 people are killed in Haryana in road accidents every year. In 2008, the state had 3,087,000 registered vehicles and 11,241 cases of road accidents.
Biometric systems -- designed to automatically recognize individuals based on biological and behavioural traits such as fingerprints, palm prints, or voice or face recognition -- are "inherently fallible," says a new report by the National Research Council, and no single trait has been identified that is stable and distinctive across all groups. To strengthen the science and improve system effectiveness, additional research is needed at virtually all levels of design and operation.
"For nearly 50 years, the promise of biometrics has outpaced the application of the technology," said Joseph N. Pato, chair of the committee that wrote the report and distinguished technologist at Hewlett-Packard's HP Laboratories, Palo Alto, Calif. "While some biometric systems can be effective for specific tasks, they are not nearly as infallible as their depiction in popular culture might suggest. Bolstering the science is essential to gain a complete understanding of the strengths and limitations of these systems."
Biometric systems are increasingly used to regulate access to facilities, information, and other rights or benefits, but questions persist about their effectiveness as security or surveillance mechanisms. The systems provide "probabilistic results," meaning that confidence in results must be tempered by an understanding of the inherent uncertainty in any given system, the report says. It notes that when the likelihood of an imposter is rare, even systems with very accurate sensors and matching capabilities can have a high false-alarm rate. This could become costly or even dangerous in systems designed to provide heightened security; for example, operators could become lax about dealing with potential threats. The report identifies numerous sources of uncertainty in the systems that need to be considered in system design and operation.
Biometric recognition--the automated recognition of individuals based on their behavioral and biological characteristic--is promoted as a way to help identify terrorists, provide better control of access to physical facilities and financial accounts, and increase the efficiency of access to services and their utilization. In spite of substantial effort, however, there remain unresolved questions about the effectiveness and management of systems for biometric recognition, as well as the appropriateness and societal impact of their use. Moreover, the general public has been exposed to biometrics largely as high-technology gadgets in spy thrillers or as fear-instilling instruments of state or corporate surveillance in speculative fiction.
Now, as biometric technologies appear poised for broader use, increased concerns about national security and the tracking of individuals as they cross borders have caused passports, visas, and border-crossing records to be linked to biometric data. A focus on fighting insurgencies and terrorism has led to the military deployment of biometric tools to enable recognition of individuals as friend or foe.
Biometric Recognition: Challenges and Opportunities addresses the issues surrounding broader implementation of this technology, making two main points: first, biometric recognition systems are incredibly complex, and need to be addressed as such. Second, biometric recognition is an inherently probabilistic endeavor. Consequently, even when the technology and the system in which it is embedded are behaving as designed, there is inevitable uncertainty and risk of error. This report elaborates on these themes in detail to provide policy makers, developers, and researchers a comprehensive assessment of biometric recognition that examines current capabilities, future possibilities, and the role of government in technology and system development.
You can download this 183 page report (after registration) here.
Dubai airports will not use hi-tech full-body scanners because they "contradict Islam" and violate passengers' privacy, according to reports — even though the scanners can detect terrorist threats like those posed by the Christmas Day bomber.
Neither of Dubai's two airports will use the scanners "out of respect for the privacy of individuals and their personal freedom," the head of airport security for the emirate told Al-Bayan daily, AFP reported.
"The scanners will be replaced with other inspection systems that preserve travelers' privacy," said Dubai police's Brigadier Pilot Ahmad Mohammad Bin Thani, the AFP reported.
After a six-month test, Italy's government will drop the use of full-body scanners for security checks in airports, judging them slow and ineffective, Italian daily Corriere della Sera reported yesterday. The scanners in the airports of Rome, Venice and the southern city of Palermo are no longer in use and Milan's airport is likely to stop using the machines in the near future. "We didn't get good results from body scanners during testing, it takes a long time to examine a person, more than with a manual inspection," said Vito Riggio, the president of Italy's aviation authority.
Officials also believe measures taken to address privacy concerns over the use of the scanners have dampened the machines' effectiveness at locating arms and explosives, Corriere della Sera reported.
A final decision on the use of the machines will be taken by a government commission.
Many frequent fliers complain they're time-consuming or invade their privacy. The world's airlines say they shouldn't be used for primary security screening. And questions are being raised about possible effects on passengers' health.
"The system takes three to five times as long as walking through a metal detector," says Phil Bush of Atlanta, one of many fliers on USA TODAY's Road Warriors panel who oppose the machines. "This looks to be yet another disaster waiting to happen."
The machines — dubbed by some fliers as virtual strip searches — were installed at many airports in March after a Christmas Day airline bombing attempt. The Transportation Security Administration has spent more than $80 million for about 500 machines, including 133 now at airports. It plans to install about 1,000 by the end of next year.
But the machines are running into complaints and questions here and overseas:
• The International Air Transport Association, which represents 250 of the world's airlines, including major U.S. carriers, says the TSA lacks "a strategy and a vision" of how the machines fit into a comprehensive checkpoint security plan. "The TSA is putting the cart before the horse," association spokesman Steve Lott says.
• Security officials in Dubai said earlier this month they wouldn't use the machines because they violate "personal privacy," and information about their "side effects" on health isn't known.
• Last month, the European Commission said in a report that "a rigorous scientific assessment" of potential health risks is needed before machines are deployed there. It also said screening methods besides the new machines should be used on pregnant women, babies, children and people with disabilities.
The U.S. Homeland Security chief will urge 190 nations today to improve aviation security with body scanners and other innovations to stop terrorists from carrying plastic and powdered explosives onto airplanes. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the push aims to counter terrorists who might use international flights for attacks by smuggling explosives through overseas metal detectors.
Such devices can't stop suicide bombers from hiding unconventional weapons under their clothes. A Nigerian man is under federal indictment for trying to blow up an international flight headed for Detroit in December by igniting powdered explosives in his underwear.
"We need to move to the next stage of screening," Napolitano told USA TODAY. Terrorists "have kind of figured out the magnetometer business." Napolitano will make her pitch in Montreal to the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations arm that sets global aviation standards. The nearly 200 nations that make up ICAO will agree Wednesday (29th of September) to improve aviation security through better technology and more sharing of information about terrorist threats, ICAO Secretary General Raymond Benjamin said in an interview.
Air passengers should be made aware of the health risks of airport body screenings and governments must explain any decision to expose the public to higher levels of cancer-causing radiation, an inter-agency report said.
Pregnant women and children should not be subject to scanning, even though the radiation dose from body scanners is “extremely small,” said the Inter-Agency Committee on Radiation Safety report, which is restricted to the agencies concerned and not meant for public circulation. The group includes the European Commission, International Atomic Energy Agency, Nuclear Energy Agency and the World Health Organization.
A more accurate assessment about the health risks of the screening won’t be possible until governments decide whether all passengers will be systematically scanned or randomly selected, the report said. Governments must justify the additional risk posed to passengers, and should consider “other techniques to achieve the same end without the use of ionizing radiation.”
MaxID, a leading provider of identity solutions broadened its solution offerings today with the announcement of MaxIDentity Services, a cloud-based system for real-time collection, storage, organization and analysis of field-based identity verification and intelligence data.
The MaxIDentity Services offering allow organizations using MaxID handheld multimodal devices to feed real-time identity and intelligence information into a central repository that can be accessed from a simple web browser.
Time and location-based information is combined with the field data to provide a crystal-clear real-time view and analysis.
“The innovative, user-focused functionality that MaxIDentity Services brings to the agency or facility is impressive,” said Mark Sauter, Managing Director of Legend Merchant Group, Inc. and co-author of the leading homeland security textbook and widely-quoted industry reports. “By combining cloud computing, real-time information flows from field devices, time and geospatial data, and powerful analytics, MaxID Corp raises the bar in its category.”
For more information please visit:
http://usa.maxidcorp.com/
The Open Biometrics Initiative (OBI) is an open source project and forum managed by ImageWare Systems, but available for inclusion by anyone participating in the open source community. The goal of the OBI is to advance the current state of the art and product by releasing biometrics technologies as open source for closer collaboration with the public, private, and academic sectors, and to facilitate the design and creation of new biometric technologies that currently are or will become industry standards.
As a software developer, you can incorporate proven technologies that implement industry standards for identity management and biometric interoperability. As a participant in the OBI, you can help drive those standards and advance biometric identity management technologies.
It is our desire to create an open community where biometric technologies can thrive, grow, and provide competitive advantage to its participants.
House of Fraser, premium department store, has introduced its first bespoke men's shirt service in association with Bivolino. Customers can shop online and buy tailor-made shirts from Bivolino, a brand renowned for its cut shirts made from the fine materials.
Bivolino worked closely with William Morris wallpaper designs, famous for their innovations in printing and weaving technology, to create fine fabric contrasts for collar and cuffs, exclusively for House of Fraser customers. A patented biometric sizing technology, Linosoft, calculates a customer's height, weight and collar size and allows them to create the perfect bespoke shirt
A new 3D 'shirt designer' on the House Of Fraser website enables customers to order a custom made-to-measure men’s shirt in four easy steps, choosing the fabric, design, monogram and size. There is an extensive range of high quality fabrics to suit every taste and any requirement. Customers can choose from more than 100 fabric options including non-iron materials, luxury Egyptian cotton, exclusive linens, liberty flowers and many more.
The shirts can be customized and customers can choose from a variety of unique cuffs and collar types, different pocket sizes and more.
Customers can choose embroidery detailing and decide where they would like it positioned.
By simply entering a few details about height and weight, Bivolino's patented biometric sizing technology ensures that the customer receives the best fit possible for their bespoke, made-to-measure shirt.
House of Fraser's eCommerce director, Peter Callaway, said: "We are delighted to announce this exciting new partnership with Bivolino. We constantly strive to go beyond our customers' expectations and Bivolino's bespoke shirt service will achieve that."
Customers can now order and purchase custom made mens shirts online with House of Fraser.
Fulcrum Biometrics, a leading international provider, distributor and integrator of multiple biometric identification systems and biometric devices, today announced the delivery of a biometric management solution to the Bergen County Department of Human Services (DHS). Working with New Jersey Business Systems(NJBS), Fulcrum Biometrics used their modular development system, the Fulcrum Biometric Framework(FbF), to develop an easy-to-use fingerprint identification system that will allow the Bergen DHS to better serve their homeless population.
The new system will provide more accurate identification of homeless individuals who are seeking and receiving services from the County and feed more detailed data to the larger New Jersey state database, a repository of homeless population information that helps to serve the community through food, clothing and housing programs. By providing more accurate identification and eliminating duplicate records, the County will be able to better support funding requests and grant applications, further enhancing services provided to the homeless community.
