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,” says John Boyd, the assistant director of OBIM, 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.
“What I’m looking to do is how do we improve those, swift, sure and secure identity services beyond” five years, Boyd says, adding that he is looking to “anticipate customers’ needs.”
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 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, tells HSR 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, video analytics, avatars, and even earlobe, Boyd says. But, he adds, his charter goes beyond that to include things like what are the next-generation needs for information technology such as computer storage and processing.
In collaboration with the DHS Science and Technology branch, Boyd says that in the next year is a plan for a project to use commercial and government off-the-shelf solutions in the “non-production” portion of IDENT to demonstrate the storing, matching, analysis and data sharing of DNA. The project will use synthetic DNA, he says.
If all goes well, then DHS will look to move forward on DNA for identity purposes, Boyd says.
The IDENT system is around 20 years old and is costly to operate, and isn’t efficient to scale. HART, on the other hand, is supposed to be more scalable over its life to handle the increasing numbers of unique biometric identities, currently around 225 million, artifacts, which number around 3.3 billion, and new biometric modalities.
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 says 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, and “digital exhaust,” he says. 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.
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.
OBIM is also expanding its cooperation with the FBI in the area of identity solutions. Boyd says several OBIM employees will sit with the FBI’s Biometric Center of Excellence.
The FBI operates the Next-Generation Identification system, a multimodal biometric database used by law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. to help identify potential criminals. Boyd says OBIM is also working to close remaining information sharing gaps with the DoD ABIS system within the next year.