Biometrics deployments expand protection against fraud and lying about your age

Biometrics are protecting against false claims of all sorts in several of the most-read articles of the past week on Biometric Update, from fake identity in airports to theft via online government platforms to young people lying to get access to age restricted goods or services. SITA has a bold claim for airport biometrics adoption over the next two years, ID.me is taking on identity verification for another government customer, and Yoti, ROC, Dermalog, Incode, Neurotechnology and Unissey are the first crop of age estimation providers to be evaluated by NIST.

Top biometrics news of the week

Kenya wants to issue 3 million digital IDs and a million biometric passports over the course of 2024. That would be twice as many passports as last year, but the goal is aided by new printing machines and three new planned new passports offices. The government has also set a target of digitizing 46 million records of births and deaths across the nation.

Kuwait has registered the fingerprints of 2 million citizens and expats out of the 2.4 million it plans to reach. Those unregistered after the June deadline may be blocked from some government services. The country is launching a by-appointment at-home biometrics enrollment service for the elderly and those otherwise unable to visit a government registration center.

A highly-publicized welfare benefits fraud case in the UK has led to guilty please by five perpetrators. They used real and fake IDs to steal nearly £54 million, targeting a system that did not include robust document authenticity or biometric liveness checks. Hundreds of forged and falsified documents like tenancy agreements and pay-slips were recovered by police.

ID cards have long been a contentious issue in the UK, and with an election looming, a Labor politician says another hot topic, “the small boats scandal might never have happened” if their introduction had not been abandoned. Mandatory photo ID for voting was introduced by the incumbent Conservative Party last year, setting up ID cards as a major focus for next January’s election.

The AAMVA is setting up a Digital Trust Service to ease the use of mobile driver’s licenses with PKI. The service will be used in Utah and Maryland to pilot mDL interoperability, and the AAMVA has published implementation guidelines to help states catch up to the early issuers. Meanwhile, the latest stats suggest there will soon be 2.5 million mDL holders between California and Arizona, and the STA has published a guide for relying parties like law enforcement, retailers and government agencies to use mDLs.

U.S. Health and Human Services has switched from Login.gov to ID.me to secure its grantee payment platform. The switch follows a security breach just over a year ago that resulted in thefts from grantees totaling millions of dollars. Login.gov has already moved to raise its security level by piloting selfie biometrics starting in May.

Apple has announced it will offer used parts, including the biometric hardware behind Face ID, in response to the demands of right-to-repair advocates. The company needs to know the sensors are genuine, warning that third-party biometric sensors are a security risk, and then calibrate them to make sure they work properly.

Maryland’s new law on the use of facial recognition by police will require evidence beyond a biometric match to positively ID a suspect or make an arrest. Audits, restrictions against identifying individuals engaged in constitutionally protected activities and protections against discrimination are all included in the Bill, which awaits only the governor’s signature.

Sri Lanka is getting $8.4 million from Japan via the IOM to install biometric gates at air and sea ports. More than half of airport check-ins and bag drops will use biometrics by 2026, SITA predicts, as the technology advances in Sri Lankan, South African, Spanish, the Dominican and Indian airports.

Facial age estimation is potentially as effective as checking the date on an ID document, according to the first-ever assessment by NIST, which tested algorithms from six biometrics providers. The assessment was based on the Challenge 25 principle, and included Yoti, ROC, Dermalog, Incode, Neurotechnology and Unissey, Biometric Standards and Testing Lead Patrick Grother revealed during a preview last week. The preview came during a session at the Global Age Assurance Standards Summit, just one of the highlights during the week-long event.

Congratulations to mathematics researcher Takeo Kanade, who BBVA Foundation calls “the father of 3D machine vision,” on his Frontiers of Knowledge award. The Carnegie Mellon professor found a way to simplify the object-tracking process, and the calculations involved in processing images, as explained in a profile that covers his influence on facial recognition, concern about deepfakes, and the introduction of the EyeVision system at the 2001 Super Bowl.

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Article Topics

biometric authentication  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  fraud prevention  |  week in review