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Recent years have shown that there are many difficulties in stopping attempts to evade or deceive biometric security systems. For this purpose IARPA’s (The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, National Intelligence Directorate) Odin Program has awarded a contract to a company in order to research and develop “dynamic biometrics” able to better detect these attempts.

The company, SRI International has been awarded a four-year $12.5 million contract. The ability to detect these “presentation attacks” addresses a critical weakness in current biometric security systems and can significantly expand biometric use cases.

The market for biometric sensors is expected to grow to $24.4 billion by 2020. The expected growth is due to initiatives taken by governments and businesses across the world to adopt fingerprint and face biometrics systems for a broad range of use cases such as travel checkpoints, facility access points, and identity verification and cyber-authentication.  However, the inability to detect attempts to deceive biometric security systems (presentation attacks) relegate biometric use cases to relatively low risk applications such as unlocking one’s phone, or applications in which a human guard is present to spot and stop overtly 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,” Jeffrey Lubin, senior research scientist at SRI told SRI’s site. “We believe the dynamic biometrics developed in this program will greatly expand the range of uses for biometric systems, benefiting people, businesses and governments around the world.”

SRI International will forge and deliver a prototype system to defeat known and unknown presentation attacks. To succeed, SRI has assembled a strong multidisciplinary team with depth and diversity of expertise in human physiology, dynamic 3D imaging, 3D shape and behavioral dynamics modeling, and system development, evaluation and deployment.