The Defense Department’s Biometrics Task Force (BTF) is putting together a pilot project that would enroll and identify friendly forces in a biometric database as part of an effort to incorporate biometrics into access control procedures at military installations and facilities in the U.S., the director of the office says.
The purpose of the ID Protect project would help DoD understand the technology, policy, and business administration of managing biometrics on the “blue side,” Dr. Myra Gray, says last month at a biometrics conference sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association. This includes protecting data and providing timely information to decision makers whether to grant or deny access to someone trying to enter a military base, she says.
The database for ID Protect is similar to the DoD’s Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), which is supplied by Northrop Grumman [NOC] using a biometric matching engine developed by L-1 Identity Solutions [ID]. The DoD ABIS, which is managed by the BTF, is populated with fingerprints and other biometric modalities such as iris images collected from enemy combatants and possible terrorists by U.S. soldiers in overseas conflicts.
ID Protect would also use L-1’s biometric matching software although it would be a separate database from DoD ABIS.
Gray says that as the uses of biometrics are expanded across DoD, a lot of the technologies and business approaches will be the same whether for blue or red forces.
But for ID Protect it’s about “how to take the capability and put it into practice and what are the rules [for blue forces] versus the old rules?” she says.
There are some deployments and pilot projects of biometric-enabled access control at some military bases and facilities in the U.S. and overseas but these efforts are basically separate from each other. For example, Gray says, at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida there is a biometrically-enabled gate between a Veterans Administration medical clinic that is adjacent to the base, allowing volunteers who are enrolled in the hand geometry system to transport via golf carts clinic patients to the base hospital for additional treatment rather than taking a less convenient route.
“The patient doesn’t have to drive from one place to the other, or worse yet, try to find a ride and then pass through the stringent security at the main gates of Eglin,” Gray says.
While there continue to be piecemeal efforts for biometric-enabled physical access at defense department bases and installations, the BTF and DoD are still trying to develop requirements for biometric-enabled base access for friendly forces at U.S. installations. Requirements include addressing uses such as accuracy of authentication, throughput, and the like, and how some of these may change depending on changing security levels, a defense official tells TR2.
Having a common set of biometric access control requirements across the DoD enterprise may make it easier for personnel who work at multiple installations from having to re- register at each base as is currently the case, the defense official says.