US plans voice biometrics upgrade and shift to cloud for DoD Automated Biometric Identification System

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) intends to move the remaining on-premise elements of its Automated Biometric Identification System to Amazon Web Services’ cloud ahead of a series of upgrades, including the addition of biometric voice recognition.

A request for information on the ‘Biometrics Enabling Capacity (BEC) – Increment 1’ has been published by the agency, seeking feedback on how to transition all interfaces based on Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) to AWS’ IL5-certified cloud environment.

The current ABIS version 1.3 owes part of its development to Increment 0 of the same program, Nextgov reports, which was launched in 2007 and led to the launch of ABIS 1.2 in 2014.

The DoD holds biometric records for over 18 million people, many of them enemy combatants. Face, fingerprint, iris and other biometric data is held among those records.

The system is currently spread over five separate environments, with operations and development hosted on-premises, and AWS cloud hosting for operational and disaster testing environments and a backup operations environment. The ABIS 1.3 consists of the ABIS Core, which integrates the other elements, a search capability contracted from Morpho before it joined with OT to become Idemia, an Examination Tools widget, a portal, and a system administration toolset.

Now the DoD is looking for a system integrator to sustain the ABIS 1.3 with performance monitoring, cybersecurity compliance and system updates, database maintenance and other upgrades.

The DoD also seeks a set of enhancements to enable automated communications between the Identity Intelligence Analytic Repository (I2AR) and DoD ABIS, perform custom and secondary searches of the Biometric Enabled Watchlist (BEWL), transition all ABIS environments to the cloud. The enhancements also include standing up ingestion, processing, matching, storing, sharing and management capabilities for voice biometrics, access denial notifications communicated between Forward Operating Bases, an architecture upgrade to enable the use of the top biometric matching algorithms, the development of an environment for interoperability testing, and training resources.

Thirdly, the DoD want to upgrade the DNA capabilities, self-monitoring capabilities, and fusion accuracy and performance of the ABIS.

The submission guidelines ask contract applicants for details on current and past government contracts, staffing plans and if they posses an approved Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) accounting system.

Responses are due by November 19.

Article Topics

ABIS  |  Amazon  |  biometric database  |  biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  cloud services  |  Department of Defense  |  RFI  |  United States  |  voice biometrics