Face biometrics a big winner as everything from driver’s licenses to KYC goes mobile, remote

Digital identity credentials like mobile driver’s licenses and facial recognition made up many of the most-read biometrics news stories of the week. People in Florida may soon be able to use Thales-made mDLs secured by Face ID, which would fit right in with the increasing use of facial recognition for applications from logical access control for enterprise accounts or government services to video KYC. In the latter case, a new partnership between Mastercard and Signzy could shake up an emerging niche.

An article by UNDP’s Tariq Malik for the Centre on Global Development summarizes Malawi’s leap from no national registry or ID system to a biometrics-backed national system with wide coverage and free ID cards in just three years. The commitment, coordination, and cooperation that underpin that success set an example for governments elsewhere, Malik suggests in our most widely-read story of the week.

An Apple filing shows the use of device-based biometrics as a security layer for protecting digital identity documents like mobile driver’s licenses and digital travel credentials, in addition to their use for verification against the same credentials.

Mobile driver’s licenses appear to be catching on, with Thales announced as Florida’s provider for mDLs and the accompanying verification services. IBIA will host a webinar on The State of Mobile Identity Credentials moderated by Biometric Update’s Chris Burt on October 20.

The importance of privacy and the concepts espoused by the self-sovereign identity movement to digital identity are accentuated by the increased digitization the COVID-19 pandemic has caused, writes Ivar Wiersma, head of venture development at R3 in a guest post. Those concepts include transparency and decentralization, and Wiersma sees market forces pushing things that way in the near future.

Japan’s SBI Sumishin Net Bank deployed FIDO authentication with facial recognition and fingerprint biometrics in July of this year, and a company representative tells the FIDO Alliance in an interview that the resulting authentication feature registered roughly 100,000 users in the first three weeks after its launch. In the new year, the company will retire its legacy authentication method to go all-FIDO.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal takes a look at just some of the many things that could potentially be hacked as they are connected to the internet, from implanted medical devices to the energy grid. Experts say society has a lot to figure out about the security of the internet of things over the next decade.

FacePhi has another contract for its facial recognition technology, but unlike many of the company’s recent announcements this one is not a financial institution seeking remote identity verification. Instead, South Korean cybersecurity firm HancomWITH will use FacePhi’s Selphi software to secure its internal systems and accounts.

Mastercard has partnered with Signzy to roll out a global video KYC service based on face biometrics. The deal furthers the payments company’s financial inclusion efforts in India, and potentially gives Signzy an enormous boost in international reach.

Face biometrics solutions the New Zealand government plans to offer to various agencies and approved private organizations has been deployed, and is powered by NEC face biometrics. The contract is between the Department of Internal Affairs and DXC Technology, and the database also includes fingerprints.

Vein recognition could soon add another layer of biometric security to facial recognition systems by utilizing the near-infrared cameras many smartphones already have, Nok Nok Labs VP of Products Rolf Lindemann tells Biometric Update in an email interview. By making use of data that is not publicly available, Lindemann argues that even targeted physical attacks can be defeated.

Data breaches have become endemic to the healthcare industry, and biometrics can provide the authentication security it needs to change the situation, Shufti Pro Senior Business Developer Sarah Amundsson writes in a Biometric Update guest post. Video KYC with 3D liveness detection in particular holds promise for healthcare, Amundsson argues.

A biometrics expert with the U.S. DHS says airport facial recognition will soon work for passengers without removing their masks. The news comes just as France’s data protection regulator cautions stakeholders to tread cautiously with their face biometrics implementations to make sure they do not violate GDPR, but two more deployments and a new partnership show the pace of momentum in the area.

The existential threat the near-complete halt in commercial passenger air travel posed to Clear is subsiding, but the company’s ambitions to provide a “holistic identity verification platform” making use of all the data that go along with its identity verification services is just beginning to come to light, OneZero writes. Maxine Most tells the publication that if Health Pass gets the company into the enterprise space, it would be “huge.”

NtechLab and other facial recognition companies based in Russia are examples of the country’s progress towards its ambition to draw closer to the U.S. in terms of technological capabilities, according to Samuel Bendett, who is an advisor to the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) Adversary Analysis Group’s Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence Russia Studies Program. Bendett tells Mind Matters that speech recognition is another good example, but notes that the relation between the state and the country’s private sector is still fraught.

The remote proctoring solution used by Bar Associations in California, Pennsylvania, and several other states turned the state bar exams into a “Barpocalypse,” according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Reports of exam-takers vomiting, urinating themselves, and even giving birth under the watchful eye of digital proctors seems to undercut claims from some Bar Associations that the remote exams were a success.

Commercial voice biometrics systems are not about to be able to accurately identify children, according to new research from Clarkson University.  Issues related to the sensitive data of minors makes even academic study of children’s biometrics complex, let alone commercial development.

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Article Topics

access control  |  authentication  |  biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  facial recognition  |  identity management  |  identity verification  |  KYC