Transportation Security

The ability to match the passenger’s identity with complete certainty through key stages of the passenger’s journey (passenger provenance) has long been recognized as a key component of transportation security, as reflected in various international mandates that require such provenance to be performed.

Replacement of the traditional labor-intensive and costly manual checks and card-based systems with iris recognition technology that performs at a distance and has high person-throughput capability allows automatic and seamless Passenger Provenance throughout a passenger’s journey with complete certainty. No additional staff is required and it is quite possible that staff can be reduced, while passenger satisfaction is enhanced.

Problem :
 

• Home Boarding Pass Printing: By 2007/8, all tickets in the US will be e-tickets. Home boarding pass printing is commonplace. Duplication then alteration of boarding pass allows check-in under one name, and flight under another
• Mixing of Incoming/Outgoing Passengers: Security on any flight is as good as the weakest airport/airline in the entire flight system
• Cursory Manual ID Check: No positive ID at gate in many jurisdictions (e.g. US)
• Manual ID check in other locations, with manual check of photograph shown to be very often ineffective
• Passenger Manifests : By early 2008, manifests must be submitted to the US at time of departure
• Fines for incorrect passenger manifests and  passengers with missing / lost documentation
• Passenger Convenience: Airports and airlines looking for new ways to differentiate themselves
• Opportunities exist for streamlining customer passage, and for providing information/ messaging customers.

Ideal Solution:

HBOX technology links passenger identity automatically, seamlessly and accurately and provides passenger convenience.

Passenger Convenience
 

• Travelers go through documentation checks faster.
• Preferred Travelers are recognized in real-time for customized services.
• HBOX hotspots along the way give personalized information to all users  seamlessly in real-time : Gate changes, Flight time changes, Car location  reminder, etc.

Reduced Risk & Cost to Airlines
 

• Human error is eliminated in documentation checks.
• Potential for reduced staffing.
• Airlines can achieve considerable cost savings through increased operational efficiency.
• Passenger manifests can be managed in real time and with complete accuracy

Download the PDF document here

Protecting Children

Re-pairing of parents with their missing children by helping law enforcement, security and families through positive identification of missing, abducted and runaway children via iris recognition.

Problem: In Themeparks
 

• According to the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, there are more than 400 amusement parks and traditional attractions in the US alone.
• In 2006, amusement parks in the US entertained 335 million visitors.
• That translates to an average daily attendance of 917K (in the US only (the actual number is higher as most parks are not open year-round).
• The number of amusement park visitors continues to rise, at an annual rate of 2%.
• Amusement parks are full of distractions that draw young children away from their chaperones.

Ideal Solution:
 

• Should provide speedy repatriation
• Should be able to process large number of children almost simultaneously
• Should improve visitor experience
• Should be a combination of low cost-high tech solution
• Should be able to accurately and positively identify children
• Should prevent the child from leaving the environs of the venue without an alarm being activated and the venue security being notified
• Should provide in-motion location tracking
• Should not have parts/devices that can get separated from/lost by children
• Should be unobtrusive to the child

Download the PDF document here

Problem: Missing Children
 

• According to National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 261 Amber Alert cases were activated in 2006. As reported by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the real situation on the other hand, is much more dramatic:
• “…A child goes missing every 40 seconds in the US, over 2,100 per day.
• In excess of 800,000 children are reported missing each year.
• Another 500,000 go missing without ever being reported…”
• Most of the missing children go through different processes (natural, voluntary or forced) at the end of which their identity on the paper (name, home address, state, even residence country etc.) is changed. This weakens the chances of law enforcement and parents locating them and their safe return home.
• Moreover, the child might end up leaving the state or even the country, in which case, the absence of interstate or inter-country communication and database of missing children becomes a major hurdle in their recovery by law enforcement and their subsequent return to home.

Ideal Solution:
 

• No matter the events that led a child to be categorized as missing , the first and foremost step in law enforcement agencies’ recovery and return efforts is positive identification. Traditional methods involve manual check of photographs, ID documents, interviews and such like. These are often time-consuming, not accurate, subject to human error and can be misleading (e.g. name change, change of a child’s face due to aging). It is crucial that the means of identification does and cannot change over time and cannot be changed. Therefore iris recognition is ideal as iris is a biometric that is stable over time and cannot be changed, and is a highly accurate biometric.

Physical Access Control

Despite the advantages of the iris biometric, its widespread use as a physical access control solution has been limited by previous iris image acquisition technology that has low person-throughput and is difficult to use.

GRI’s technologies fulfill the requirements for large-scale deployment of iris-based physical access control technologies by providing: (1) High person-throughput; (2) Ease of use; (3) Unobtrusiveness; (4) Accuracy; (5) Liveness detection that requires the individual to be present at time of recognition, and thereby eliminates risk of spoofing; (6) Identification in anonymity that can perform recognition without the individual’s demographic and personal information such as name and address; (7) Scalability

Problem:
 

• Conventional physical access control systems today comprise card-based and fingerprint-based technologies. Unfortunately, these while purporting to provide secure access control, often fail to address many types of security threats and are often abused or bypassed. Moreover, conventional access control technologies are too slow, too insecure or too difficult to use to provide other benefits such as increased operational efficiency (e.g. reduced waiting time at access points during shift changes) or customer services (e.g. offer a service based on the identity of the individual).

Ideal Solution:
 

• The iris biometric has long been known to be more accurate and reliable than fingerprint, handprint or the face biometric. For example, a fingerprint inherently contains much less information than the iris and this means that a person can only be reliably matched against a small database. In this case each individual would need an additional token or swipe-card that needs scanned or swiped in addition to their fingerprint each time access is demanded. On the other hand, the iris inherently contains so much information that one-to-many (approximately 1-to-1.2million) matching can be performed, which means that no token or swipe is required. In a sense, the iris itself is a unique bar-code for the individual. In addition to the inherent accuracy of the iris, the iris lies safely behind the cornea of the eye, and is imaged remotely. The quality of a fingerprint however is a function of how the individual manipulates their finger on the fingerprint reader. There are also wide segments of the population in which fingerprints are highly unreliable; for example, the fingers of laborers typically are worn and very difficult to read using a fingerprint reader device.
• Despite the advantages of the iris biometric, its widespread use as a physical access control solution has been limited by previous iris image acquisition technology that has low person-throughput and is difficult to use.
• GRI’s technologies fulfill the requirements for large-scale deployment of iris-based physical access control technologies by providing: (1) High person-throughput; (2) Ease of use; (3) Unobtrusiveness; (4) Accuracy; (5) Liveness detection that requires the individual to be present at time of recognition, and thereby eliminates risk of spoofing; (6) Identification in anonymity that can perform recognition without the individual’s demographic and personal information such as name and address; (7) Scalability

Logical Access Control & Online Banking

Logical access ranges from simply logging on to a PC/laptop, to an online banking account, to a bank server with valuable information of their customers, LANs and WANs. Unfortunately, in spite of all the investment that has gone into securing individuals and organizations in these environments they fail to stop attackers from defeating identity security, and thus the security of nations, of financial institutions records, and of individual citizens and consumers.

Iris-based logical access control technology replaces log-in name and passwords, PINs and other conventional tokens that can easily be stolen, guessed, given away and replicated, with the iris.

GRI offers its logical access control technology at price points that are suitable for mass deployment—at every computer in an organization for example—as well as for home use (simply plug-and-play).

Vehicular Access Control

Problem:
 

• Current vehicular access control to military bases involves manual inspection of the common access cards as a flash pass which is not enough identity security mandated by HR1585 Section 1069.
• Options considered are public key infrastructure (PKI), fingerprint and traditional iris recognition technologies that are too slow to conform with the minimum acceptable throughput at a military base gate of 6 vehicles per minute (AF IBDSS).
• The potential latency from verifying biometrics and/or other forms of identification is unacceptable for safety and traffic mitigation reasons.

Ideal Solution:

Incorporation of iris recognition technology that can perform “on the fly” and at a distance with a throughput capability of at least 6 vehicles per minute the expected results are:
 

• Raised level of security at military base entrances and thus raised level of overall accountability for security at the base
• Reduced authentication expenses (elimination of outflows related to card‐based system)
• Increased operational efficiency at the gates
• Elimination of lines and traffic at and around the base gates
• Watch list search

Download the PDF document here

Counter-terrorism

A key component of any surveillance system is being aware of the identity of the individuals who are under surveillance (Identification). Even if the identities of the individuals are unknown, then it is equally important that an individual observed at one time instant and location can be identified as the same individual observed at a second time instant and location (Identity Correspondence). In addition, one of the most basic counter-terrorist approaches has been to develop and distribute a watch-list based on photographs or other biometric information, and to search for suspected terrorists at border control and other key locations.

Biometrics (the science and technology of human body measurement for the purposes of identification) has long been proclaimed as a means to perform Identification, Identity Correspondence, watch list search and watch list creation.

Problem :
 

• According to the U.S. Army’s anti-terrorism level 1 training brief, the majority of terrorist clusters are exposed only during their surveillance attempts.
• Surveillance initiated near the time of a planned terrorist event is often too late to prevent it.
• Personnel are often unknown, but their patterns of travel generate information that can be used for later automatic or manual surveillance.

Ideal Solution:
 

• Should provide access control to secure sites and border control.
• Should identify individuals under surveillance in real time.
• Should monitor unknowns from one location to the next.
• Should gain intelligence by marking individuals within clusters

GRI’s HGRID comprises of installed HBOX units throughout a region or country (Grid Servers, and Distributed Surveillance Consoles)

Data analysis is performed on servers located at secure data centers.

Laptops and PDA’s are added for law enforcement and intelligence forces to deploy and utilize in the field for field operations and rapid response forces.

Country-wide HGRID deployments include a combination of iris-at-a-distance access control, passenger provenance, fused tag and track video surveillance systems, deployed at airports, border crossings and other locations.

Download the PDF document here

Secure Banking Transactions & ATMs

Current bank authentication processes involving physical ID’s and PINs/passwords are increasingly susceptible to fraud and identity theft.

Additionally, the time required for traditional customer authentication increases wait times for customers in banking centers, which decreases customer satisfaction and increases staffing expense for the bank.

Numerous reports of identity theft in the media have attracted attention to fraudulent activity and security is now a top concern for customers regarding their banking relationship.

Incorporation of iris recognition technology in banking centers will improve operational efficiency and authentication accuracy over traditional authentication processes. Fraud losses will decrease and customer satisfaction will increase. Implementing advanced customer security will also promote relationship growth as well as new product sales.

Expected results:
 

• Improved customer satisfaction
• Banking relationship expansion
• New product sales
• Reduced authentication expenses
• Increased banking center operational efficiency
• Decreased banking center fraud losses

The EyeSwipe with the Beware Module is deployed at all transactional locations (i.e. teller area, officer platform) throughout the bank.

Individuals cashing checks or opening accounts have their irises and face captured in real-time, along with an image of the check which is MICR read and cross referenced to the iris DB, or their ID documents as the case may be, which are associated to their transaction.

If the transaction is fraudulent, their iris and face are sent to a fraud deterrence “Watch List”. Upon attempting a second “attack,” the individual’s iris read in real-time generates a “Watch List” alarm.

ATMs

EyeSwipe-ATMs are deployed at Automated Teller Machines at banking centers.

EyeSwipe-ATM replaces the traditional card-swipe & PIN procedure at the ATM, thereby eliminating the manual labor on the bank customer side and providing identity security.

Automated Border Control

Iris-based automated border control systems considerably reduce waiting times of "low-risk" passengers for passport checking for international flight arrivals or departures. Instead of waiting in line at passport control points at the airport, land border crossing or seaports for example, individuals simply proceed to a turnstile or gate that is equipped with GRI’s iris recognition technology where they are positively identified by their iris.
 

• It is seamless for individuals to use, with no or limited instructions required so to minimize confusion in a non-familiar environment
• People flow is maintained as well as high-volume throughput throughout, as you do not want to hold up people forcing them to put down bags or perform other discrete steps that slow-down the average speed of flow
• Large numbers of people are processed with a small number of systems, with reduced footprint at location and overall cost-effectiveness
• High-level biometric accuracy for reliability is provided

Hospitals

Another suggested area of use of iris recognition technology is at hospitals, where patients are authenticated upon arrival, when they are subscribed and receive medication, and when they are undergoing treatment. The advantage here is that by identifying individuals accurately, the very common error of faulty medication—one patient’s medication is wrongfully given to another—or treatment is eliminated.