A Menlo Park research center this week was awarded $12.5 million from the federal government to solve vulnerabilities in security systems.
SRI International announced Tuesday it has been awarded a four-year contract by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), which works to overcome challenges in the U.S. intelligence community. The challenge SRI is tasked with helping to solve is a “critical weakness” in current biometric security systems and development of “dynamic biometrics,” which would enhance detection of attempts to evade or deceive such systems. Biometric systems include fingerprint, iris and face scanners.
The market for biometric sensors is expected to hit $24.4 billion by 2020, driven by government and business initiatives to adapt the technology for a range of uses, including travel checkpoints, facility access points and identity verification both online and offline, according to a news release. However, due to the inability to detect attacks on biometric systems, they are currently used for relatively low-risk applications such as unlocking cellphones or instances when a human guard is present to deter suspicious activity.
“Biometric systems will not be successful unless technical solutions providing reliable but low-cost detection of currently unknown presentation attacks can be developed,” said Jeffrey Lubin, a senior research scientist at SRI.
Current biometrics rely on static surface images of human tissue, but such scanners are ineffective at detecting attacks. SRI, working directly with IARPA’s Odin Program, is researching systems and techniques that will be able to image, measure and analyze real-time physiological responses of living tissue — such as heart rate, perspiration and blood flow — to external and internal stimuli, which “will reliably detect whether these biometric tissues are real or being faked” according to SRI.
