Government Agency Uses Biometric Software For PIV Credentialing System

  • Aug 13, 2010

Aware Inc. recently announced that it has supplied client- and server-based software products for the PIV employee credentialing system of a large U.S. federal government agency.

The software is part of a solution deployed by ICF International subsidiary Jacob & Sundstrom, an IT services firm with deep PIV expertise and experience. The system is used to provide enterprise-wide enrollment of federal employees and centralized data structuring and workflow for issuance of PIV credentials.

Aware's Universal Registration Client (URC) is a software application used to perform assisted enrollment of biographic data, facial images, fingerprints, identity documents, and digital written signatures. In the agency system, this enrollment data is forwarded to Aware's Biometric Services Platform (BioSP), a SOA application server used to aggregate, store, process, and disseminate the enrolled data for various purposes, including background checks and PIV card personalization.

Together, URC and BioSP provide a platform of GSA-approved software components that fulfill the biometric functionality requirements of their PIV system. The Aware system provides ICF International a framework for customization and quick deployment.

"Aware offers a broad biometric software platform that utilizes highly modular building blocks of biometric functionality," said David Simonetti, vice president for ICF International. "As a focused system integrator, this model suited our needs ideally because we needed GSA-approved biometrics software that fulfilled PIV mandates and yet could be quickly customized and deployed in a way that accommodated our customer's legacy systems and specific workflow requirements. The Aware solution also addresses capture hardware obsolescence risks that can impact system maintenance costs going forward, a key factor for us."

URC is a biometric enrollment application that is first used to search the agency's identity management system (IDMS) for pre-enrolled biographic data records. It utilizes Aware's biometric SDKs to perform autocapture of facial images and fingerprints and amend these records with the images and fingerprint minutiae templates along with "I9" identity document scans and digital written signatures. These biometric SDKs also enable the URC application to be used equivalently with a wide variety of market-leading biometric capture hardware devices without affecting the operation or performance of the application.

BioSP provides configuration and deployment management of the URC enrollment application, and offers PIV card-based password access control to the application. Upon completion of an enrollment, URC submits the enrollment data record with images, data, and fingerprint templates securely to BioSP, which -- via programmable workflow -- performs a host of data processing tasks as required by the system. BioSP stores the image data and integrates with agency's IDMS to associate biometric data with identities stored there. It also forwards PIV-compliant fingerprint template objects to the IDMS for card personalization. BioSP also creates fingerprint transactions for background checks and submits these to OPM.

 

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