Idiap leads project on biometric template protection for aid distribution efficiency

The Biometrics Security and Privacy (BSP) group within the Idiap Research Institute will run a research project on the development of a biometric system that upholds data privacy and security by making templates irreversible, funded by an award from the Swiss Innovation Agency, Innosuisse.

Sébastien Marcel, who oversees research and collaboration efforts at the group, announced in a LinkedIn post that the project is dubbed “PRiMEAiD: Privacy-pReserving bioMetric idEntification for humAnitarian aid Distribution.” He said the research project is due to kick off this week.

Biometrics are increasingly being used to facilitates the identification of beneficiaries in humanitarian settings and ensures efficiency in the distribution of aid. But concerns about the security of huge volumes of data collected from data subjects remains a major preoccupation among humanitarian organizations.

A recent report by Rand highlighted this issue, noting that biometrics regulations and organizational policies have generally developed more slowly than both the underpinning technologies and the crisis contexts in which they are used.

In response to this scenario therefore, Marcel says the PRiMEAiD project is intended to “create a privacy-preserving biometric identification system based on biometric template protection (BTP) technology” involving “investigating non-invertible protection algorithms.”

The grant award is for 361,498 Swiss francs (approximately US$418,000).

Other than the funder, Innosuisse, other partners involved in the project include the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (ICRC) which recently contributed to the development of a tool labelled Janus that uses biometrics to sort duplicative registration for humanitarian aid recipients, Global ID and Swissbiometrix.

The research project will be led by Vedrana Krivokuća Hahn, a security and privacy researcher at Idiap, specialized in biometrics. Open from September 2, the project is expected to run till March 1, 2026. Hahn and Marcel have co-authored papers addressing biometric template protection through hashing and specifically for mobile applications. Template protection requirements are built into the EU’s GDPR.

Idiap has other ongoing collaborations with firms including Global ID, such as for the CANDY project on vein biometrics research.

Idiap has undertaken or collaborated on research in different areas of biometric application. It is involved in a current European Union project to study how biometrics of on-the-move subjects can be captured.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometric template protection  |  biometrics  |  biometrics research  |  Global ID  |  humanitarian  |  Idiap  |  PRiMEAiD  |  Red Cross  |  Swissbiometrix