UN pension delivery system’s biometric spoof protection passes BixeLab assessments

Australia’s BixeLab has completed a series of evaluations of the biometric Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) technology used by one of the largest international pension funds in the world, confirming its compliance to the global standard for preventing spoof attacks at Levels A and B.

The United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund Digital CE v4.2.4 uses face biometrics to authenticate pension recipients, either through pensioners’ phones or through biometric kiosks. The evaluations, based on ISO/IEC 30107-3, covered deployment on both iOS and Android devices.

The UN implemented the blockchain-based Digital Certificate of Entitlement (DCE) last year as part of its plan to modernize pension verification for the over-70,000 UNJSPF beneficiaries.

BixeLab evaluated the UNJSPF’s data capture subsystems, PAD subsystem and the full PAD system, issuing letters of confirmation for each.

“Together, these assessments examined presentation attack detection capabilities across multiple layers of the biometric verification workflow, providing a comprehensive view of system behaviour from acquisition through to final decision-making,” said BixeLab in a LinkedIn post.

The data capture subsystem caught all Level A presentation attacks, and missed 31 Level B attacks, for an overall attack presentation acceptance rate (APAR) of 4.3 percent across 720 attacks. It had 0 failure-to-acquire errors for 12 bona fide presentations.

The Video Call Verification process that the UN uses to put a human in the loop was not part of the testing scope.

The PAD subsystem made 9 classification errors on Level B presentation attacks, for an APAR of 1.25 percent in 720 attacks, without any bona fide classification errors. The full biometric PAD system, likewise, had a 1.25 percent APAR with no bona fide classification errors.

BixeLab recently published both a white paper on how laboratory tests relate to real-world biometrics deployments and a blog post for biometrics providers on how to chose a testing laboratory to help dispel market confusion.

Article Topics

biometric testing  |  biometrics  |  BixeLab  |  ISO/IEC 30107-3  |  presentation attack detection  |  spoof detection  |  United Nations