TECH5, an innovator in the field of biometrics and digital identity management, is announcing the availability of its new biometric template protection technology, fully compliant with the ISO 30136 standard. The technology will be available in TECH5’s multi-modal biometric matching system, T5-OmniMatch ABIS, for both 1:1 and 1:Nmodes, across all three biometric modalities – face, fingerprint and iris.
In biometric recognition systems, a template/feature is extracted from a biometric input (such as face, finger) and is matched with another template for identification and verification purposes. These templates, in most cases, contain privacy-sensitive information about the subject’s identity. With the growing adoption of biometrics across many domains and increasing concerns about privacy and security, it is imperative to ensure that biometric templates don’t reveal any personal identifiable information (PII) even if they are compromised. Hence, data protection regulations, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), consider biometric templates as sensitive data that must (legally) be protected. Several digital infrastructure initiatives that rely on digital identities have highlighted biometrics as being crucial for ensuring secure and user-friendly interactions between users and service providers. However, there is a cautious approach to adopting biometrics due to privacy and security concerns. Europe’s digital identity framework eIDAS is no exception. TECH5’s biometric template protection aims to alleviate these concerns and build trust in the technology among users.
Compliant to ISO 30136, TECH5’s proprietary biometric template protection scheme satisfies the four principal requirements:
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- Cancelability: an essential requirement, it is the capability to cancel or revoke compromised templates and issue new ones, similar to password resets. TECH5’s cutting-edge biometric template protection technology directly addresses this crucial need by providing the ability to cancel or revoke a protected biometric template and replace it with another protected template.
- Unlinkability: an often-overlooked aspect in biometrics, it guarantees that two protected templates of the same individual across different applications will not be related or linked. Users can establish distinct biometric protected templates per account, profile, or use case.
- Irreversibility: Engineered with irreversibility in mind, the technology makes it computationally extremely difficult or even impossible to recover the unprotected biometric template from a protected template.
- Accuracy: The biometric template protection technology is constructed on top of TECH5’s top-tier biometric algorithms and does not compromise the high matching accuracy, empowering customers to implement highly secure, flexible, and privacy-preserving large-scale biometric systems with minimal increase in hardware requirements.
This advanced multi-layered technology seamlessly fuses AI (Artificial Intelligence), Machine Learning and traditional methods to ensure robust template protection for both the entire database and individual users. This enables customers to implement centralized or decentralized authentication systems with equal protection. In the event of a database breach, new biometric-protected templates can be immediately deployed for the entire population, while in the case of an individual’s compromised biometric templates, the system can issue new protected templates based on the user’s PIN or passphrase input.
“Continuous innovation to achieve inclusion without compromising the security and privacy of the users is one of the founding principles at TECH5. Our biometric template protection technology prioritizes privacy while maintaining high accuracy to ensure both inclusion and security. This achievement is made possible through the exceptional collaboration of research scientists with expertise in biometrics and machine learning. As pioneers, we are among the foremost international providers of multimodal biometrics, offering this technology as an integral feature of flagship enterprise solutions like the ABIS (Automated Biometric Identification System), tailor-made for large-scale deployments.” – Comments Rahul Parthe, Co-Founder, Chairman and CTO at TECH5.