Beginning in fiscal year 2012, U.S. government agencies must upgrade their physical and logical access control systems to provide federal employees and contractors with more secure and reliable forms of identification using Personal Identity Verification (PIV) credentials.

These credentials must leverage smart card and biometric technology in accordance with National Institute of Standards and Technology guidelines embodied in FIPS 201. These upgrades must be completed before federal agencies may use development and technology refresh funds to complete other activities. 

The Malaysian Election Commission has decided to forego the use of the biometric voter verification system for the country’s upcoming elections, according to an article form The Star.

Malaysian Election Commission Chairman, Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof, said the commission may still use the biometric system for future elections, but that they will be focusing on how viable the use of indelible ink is in these elections. 

A journalist for the Mingpao Daily has managed to spoof a biometric self-service kiosk used for immigration clearance at the Hong Kong-China border, according to a PC Advisor article.

The spoofing was aided by a fingerprint cast kit bought from a Chinese online retailer called Taobao for under the equivalent of $15. 

The biometric program at HMP Isis prison in London requires inmates to authenticate their identities via thumbprint before moving from one area to the next. System errors, however, have been leading to back-ups that leads to all prisoners waiting before they can move on, according to an article from The Telegraph.

A report detailing the problem, which sometimes leaves prisoner movement halted for hours, has noted that if the system doesn’t work for 100% of prisoners otherwise a manual check needs to be performed, which is time consuming and leads to the delays. 

With more and more transaction and interaction becoming electronic, privacy concerns are on the increase. This is especially true in the context of government-to-citizen and government-to-employee transactions.

The emergence of contactless technology as the preferred interface for smart card transactions is increasing the risk of data leakage. The result is that more personal data than ever before is being shared to create a web of information about who we are and what we do.

Some people believe that the information they are required to provide during a government transaction is excessive and irrelevant, especially as recent devices in the marketplace now make it easier than ever to capture sensitive details transmitted over-the-air and over-the-Internet. With so much personal information already available, questions are being asked as to how this information is stored, exchanged and used by the authorities. 

Suprema announced that its RealScan-G10 and RealScan-10 line of fingerprint scanners have received final certification from the Government of India’s Standardization Testing & Quality Certification (STQC) to be part of the country’s Unique ID (UID) project.

The STQC certification is mandatory for any provider of live fingerprint scanners to be used in the UID project, which will utilize fingerprint and other data to provide each citizen of the country a unique identification number that corresponds to and can be authenticated by the collected biometric data. 

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking for proposals for research projects that could yield new biometric systems that authenticate users based on their own unique movements or behaviors such as the way they type or move a mouse, according to a ZDNet article.

The intent of the new project, which DARPA is calling Active Authentication (AA), is to find a new user-friendly system that can replace the password and Common Access Card-based authentication methods the Department of Defense IT systems currently require for authenticating users.