Any day now the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is about to award a contract to replace its existing biometric repository with a more robust and scalable system but the department’s identity management office is already focused on future needs looking out five years and beyond.

Other groups within the Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM) are looking at technologies and capabilities over the next five years but the Future Identity group is “looking at five years and beyond,” John Boyd, the assistant director of OBIM, said Wednesday at the AFCEA Federal Identity Forum in Washington, D.C. Boyd joined OBIM nearly a year ago and is also heading the Future Identity group.

John Boyd, assistant director of the DHS Office of Biometric Identity Management. LinkedIn photo.
John Boyd, assistant director of the DHS Office of Biometric Identity Management. LinkedIn photo.

“What I’m looking to do is how do we improve those, swift, sure and secure identity services beyond” five years, Boyd said.

DHS is looking to replace its current IDENT biometric database that is operated and maintained by OBIM. The new system is called Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) and CSRA, Inc. [CSRA], Leidos [LDOS] and Northrop Grumman [NOC] are all vying for the contract to build HART. CSRA is currently responsible for operating and maintaining IDENT for OBIM.

The award for HART is expected by the end of September although industry representatives are concerned that it could be delayed, which it has been already. Come October, which is when the federal government’s fiscal year 2018 begins, the government will be operating under a continuing resolution until at least early December, which means new programs can’t be started. It’s unclear whether this would affect HART as the program is currently funded with prior year monies.

The IDENT system is mostly populated with fingerprint records although it also includes iris and face images too. The fingerprint matching capabilities in IDENT are supplied by Gemalto and the face and iris capabilities are supplied by NEC Corp.

The first increment of HART will take 18 months to complete and include the current biometric capabilities of IDENT, including latent fingerprint management, a new data architecture, and a news system development and testing environment.

The pending contract award is for increments one and two. In the second increment, OBIM plans to provide more robust face and iris capabilities, a biometric fusion capability to provide better outcomes for multimodal biometric search results, and improved business processing workflows.

OBIM, through IDENT and eventually HART, is responsible for the storage, matching, sharing and in some cases, analysis, of the biometric data collected by other components of DHS, such as Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Congress would like to see the multi-modal capabilities of increment two accelerated. Patrick Nemeth, director of the Identity Operations Division at OBIM, told Defense Daily on Tuesday that there’s the possibility to build the more robust face and iris capabilities into HART up to six months sooner than planned, which would put that at a about a year after contract award.

Various DHS components are interested in other biometric modalities such as DNA, voice, behaviors, gait and even earlobe, Boyd said. But, he said, his charter goes beyond that to include things like what are the next-generation needs for information technology such as computer storage and processing.

The IDENT system is around 20 years old and is costly to operate, it has also run out of scale. HART, on the other hand, is supposed to be more scalable to handle the increasing numbers of unique biometric identities, currently around 225 million, and artifacts, which number around 3.3 billion.

IDENT is currently handling between 300,000 to 400,000 biometric transactions each day, well above its intended limit. Fifteen years ago, the system was receiving 3,000 queries daily. Boyd said he’s thinking about what HART will need to be able to manage 3 million transactions each day and eventually even 30 million.

Boyd is also beginning to examine how OBIM can contribute to person-centric identification, which goes beyond just matching biometrics to include other data sets such as biographic and contextual information. The Defense Department, through its intelligence capabilities and its own biometric database, the DoD ABIS, already provides contextual data around biometric matches to better aid decision-making when a match is made.

Cyber security threats are another challenge, he said.

The third and fourth increments of HART will be awarded later under a separate contract. The third increment is expected to include additional biometric modalities for storage and retrieval but not for matching. The fourth increment would add the matching as well as other capabilities.