Biometrics handling new frontiers and changed expectations, from agents to gait

Successes in airport biometrics are driving deployments and expansions all over the world. But the technology cannot perform miracles like making long lineups instantly disappear from Europe’s airports.  Making the biometrics disappear doesn’t do anything to the lineups either, apparently.

What biometrics can do at borders and in fraud prevention workflows is well established, but from gait recognition to agentic AI authorizations, the technology is being asked to do more.

Line-ups and express lanes

The EU has already allowed Member States to suspend the biometrics requirement for EES for the summer, so that’s not the cause of the delays so extensive the bloc had to block a call this week from the aviation industry for its full suspension. EU authorities admit that there is a problem, but say it is limited to a small minority of locations. Meanwhile, the ETIAS pre-authorization system is being delayed.

SITA says in a new impact report that the key to meeting capacity crunches is not physical infrastructure like building more airports, but rather leaning into the already-growing adoption of digital tools like AI and biometrics. Recent examples of that growth beyond the EU include Thailand, Somalia and Qatar.

Across the Atlantic, the TSA is rolling out a new face biometrics system called Crewmember Access Point for pilots, flight attendants and other crew members in the U.S. The program reached a handful of airports last weekend, as is expected to be fully in place by the end of September.

BixeLab put a pair of Amadeus’ biometric travel devices through its PAD testing for Levels 1 and 2 attacks, confirming their compliance to ISO/IEC 30107-3. The results suggest the devices will detect spoofs well as long as people aren’t wearing balaclavas in the airport.

New frontiers in established areas

One thing we know biometrics can do is offer a higher level of authentication assurance than any equally convenient alternative, but Spanish data protection regulatory AEPD says GDPR requires an alternative for EUDI Wallet authentication.

Vietnam is looking to biometrics to help with government service delivery and to help stem a major fraud problem with international implications, and nearing full population coverage with its digital ID.

Police in India have turned to forensic gait biometrics as they build their case against the suspect in a high-profile murder case. Attorneys for the accused questioned the effectiveness of the technology.

Next Biometrics is planning to go in all-in on all-display biometrics and divesting the rest of its fingerprint biometrics portfolio, a process which will involve delisting from the Euronext Oslo exchange.

Meanwhile, building on Biometric Update’s recent report on MOSIP, a webinar this week highlighted how the conversation around open-source digital ID has shifted from adoption to execution, with ecosystem leaders emphasizing biometric quality, field testing and long-term sustainability as deployments move from pilots to production.

Agentic AI and trust on uncharted ground

Cyber research organization Sysdig says it has witnessed an LLM carry out an agentic ransomware attack autonomously, heralding another disastrous turn in the weaponization of AI to commit crime and fraud. Reality Defender, meanwhile, has been spelling out the threat of agentic AI fraud in the voice channel.

Tools to bring trust to agentic AI are coming, with Veratad’s toolkit for human intent verification in agentic transactions built using MCP the latest.

Alice Sesay Pope, an Amazon executive and author of The Trust Algorithm: How Leaders Build Trust in Generative AI, argues on latest episode of the Biometric Update Podcast that as the stakes of AI use rise, compliance frameworks are becoming a competitive advantage.

Please let us know about any podcasts, reports or other content you think we should share with those in biometrics and the digital identity community through the comments below or social media.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  week in review