TECH5 Looks to Template Protection with New ISO 30136-compliant Solution

TECH5 has developed new biometric template protection technology, aiming to secure a particularly sensitive part of any biometric identity system.

The company says its new solution is fully compliant with the ISO 30136 standard. Titled “Biometric template protection,” the standard provides guidelines for protecting biometric templates to ensure privacy and security by focusing on cancelability, unlinkability, irreversibility, and maintaining high accuracy in biometric systems. It aims to mitigate risks associated with the use and storage of biometric data.

It’s an important issue. Biometric templates can store highly sensitive data and can be linked to personally identifiable information. That is part of the reason that the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation puts biometric templates in a special classification of sensitive data, requiring strong protections by law.

In a recent LinkedIn post, the co-founder of the biometrics startup Anonybit, Frances Zelazny, laid out some of the problems with failing to secure biometric templates. Among other things, stolen templates can be used in injection attacks. And when stored without sufficient security, they can be manipulated by fraudsters and other malefactors.

“Every time there is a breach of biometric data, the entire industry as well as the enterprise stakeholder takes a hit,” Zelazny said. “Protection of biometric templates is critical for public acceptance in light of privacy concerns.”

For its part, TECH5 has devised a system that addresses the issue of biometric template protection from a number of angles. Its solution allows administrators to directly cancel or revoke compromised templates and to issue new ones. This means that in the event of even a large-scale data breach, new templates can be deployed for the entire affected population. And if a single user’s template is compromised, a new template can be issued based on the user’s PIN or passphrase.

The solution also guarantees that two different templates pertaining to the same individual are not directly linked. And it is engineered with the aim of template irreversibility: As TECH5 explained in a statement, its technology makes it “computationally extremely difficult or even impossible to recover the unprotected biometric template from a protected template.”

“Our biometric template protection technology prioritizes privacy while maintaining high accuracy to ensure both inclusion and security,” asserted TECH5 co-founder, Chairman and CTO Rahul Parthe. “This achievement is made possible through the exceptional collaboration of research scientists with expertise in biometrics and machine learning.”

The template protection technology will be available through TECH5’s multimodal T5-OmniMatch ABIS for both 1:1 and 1:N matching modes, and will cover face, fingerprint, and iris modalities.

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July 23, 2024 – by Alex Perala