Moving closer to a procurement to sustain and modernize the Defense Department’s authoritative biometrics repository, the Army this month released draft performance work requirements for its Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS).
The Army Contracting Command, on behalf of the Project Manager DoD Biometrics, will host an Industry Day on Friday at Fort Dix, N.J., to discuss the procurement of the DoD ABIS Sustainment Services and Service Life Extension.
Northrop Grumman [NOC] is the current prime contractor supporting DoD ABIS and the various biometric software matching algorithms are supplied by MorphoTrust, which is part of France’s Safran Group. Oracle [ORCL] software is used for database storage.
A draft performance work statement published on Dec. 4 by the Army’s Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems says that the most current version of MorphoTrust’s biometric search engine and of Oracle’s database will be used for the service life extension component of the procurement.
Plans call for sustaining DoD ABIS through FY ’22, although the forthcoming contract, which will have a potential five-year period of performance, will only run through FY ’20, according to the draft work plan.
The latest version of DoD ABIS, v1.2 was deployed last fall and includes more storage capacity, higher throughput for search queries, increased accuracy, improved search algorithms, and continuous watch list availability. The current version is nearing the end of its service life. There are currently 18 million biometric records in DoD ABIS.
The forthcoming contract will sustain v1.2 while doing the service life extension program to modernize the repository to v1.3, which will include the biometric search and database upgrades, an enhanced infrastructure, enhanced data sharing and interoperability, an upgraded transaction manager, and providing continuity of operations. The interoperability improvements include enhancements with the Department of Homeland Security, which maintains the IDENT fingerprint-based database used to verify the identities of foreign nationals entering the United States.
The plans also call for making cyber security improvements to the existing DoD ABIS and incorporating new cyber risk management and cyber tools in the modernized variant.
The DoD ABIS is used for the storage and matching of fingerprints, iris, face and palm images, and relevant contextual data. By law, the biometrics in the database is only of non-U.S. citizens.
“Unlike U.S. citizen Federal Bureau of Investigation and traveler Department of Homeland Security repositories where identity is typically a well document and controlled piece of information, DoD ABIS serves a mission where identities in third world countries are an elusive, non-controlled, and sometimes purposely confounded piece of information,” the draft work statement says. It adds that “DoD ABIS is unique in the sense that, because identity is not as much of a controlled piece of information and the collection environment is often hostile, DoD ABIS’s mission tends to be more of an ‘identification’ function.”
The purpose of DoD ABIS is to deny anonymity to known and suspected terrorists.