Year in Review: Strong Consensus On the Need for Standardized Testing

The latest FindBiometrics Year in Review survey saw some considerable consensus across a number of issues, with the question of standardized testing delivering some of the strongest.

Question 20 of the survey asked participants to indicate how much they agreed with the statement, “Standardized biometric testing is crucial for the industry’s future.” Fully 89 percent of respondents agreed, with 48 percent indicating that they “Strongly agree”. No one indicated that they “Strongly disagree”.

The consensus on this issue shouldn’t be surprising. Standards testing has long been a crucial component of the biometrics industry, with organizations like the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) regularly evaluating biometric identification systems across clearly defined parameters. And the significant emergence of consumer-focused biometric technologies over the last several years has also seen the rise of groups like the FIDO Alliance to evaluate authentication mechanisms in more commercial products and services.

As these technologies have evolved, so have the threats that they face, with presentation attacks increasingly considered an important challenge to face down. And to that end, new standards evaluation regimes have emerged, perhaps most notably in the case of the NIST-accredited iBeta and its PAD evaluation based on the ISO/IEC 30107-3 standard. So far only one company, FaceTec, has managed to attain Level 1 certification in this particular test, but given the consensus around the importance of standardized biometric testing among the broader industry – as indicated in the responses to Question 20 of the 2018 Year in Review – there are likely to be some serious challengers stepping up to the plate in the years to come.

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January 23, 2019 – by Alex Perala