HP wins DHS contract to upgrade employee identification cards

HP has won a significant contract to upgrade the Department of Homeland Security’s employee identification cards.

Reported in Nextgov, the 10-year deal worth $102.8 million requires a complete replacement of the department’s fingerprint ID system to accommodate new modalities such as iris.

In May, the department published a request for proposal for this decade-long contract, which sought to upgrade nearly 200,000 identification cards in 2013 and another 115,000 in 2014.

Iris has seen a lot of renewed attention in the biometrics community as of late, following NIST’s publication of the much-anticipated FIPS 201-2 document, which adds optional iris images to standard PIV credentials.

NIST has also recently published a new IREX study, which found that iris is a stable biometric modality, not affected over time by aging eyes.

Reported previously, the Department of Homeland Security also recently published a request for information, regarding a “mobile electronic biometric/biographic data collection device.” Specifically, the department says it is seeking information on the “current and near-term availability of a data collection device on a mobile electronic platform, capable of obtaining biometric and biographic information and communicating wirelessly through a virtual private network.”

Article Topics

DHS  |  fingerprint  |  government  |  identification  |  iris  |  PIV cards