Because biometrics can offer a degree of iden-tification well beyond other technologies, the future of digital identity has become closely linked with this fast-growing area. Although there are many biometric technologies from which to choose, when it comes to checking identities out in the field, the flexibility, accu-racy and ease-of-use of mobile fingerprinting make a compelling case for the widespread use of this technology right now.

Determining identity through biometricsGenerally speaking, we consider biometrics to be the automated identification, or verification, of human identity through measurable, repeat-able, physiological and behavioural character-istics. Although biometric technologies vary in complexity, capabilities, and performance, cer-tain common elements can nonetheless be iden-tified. Whether fixed or mobile, a conventional (uni-modal) biometric system, for example, will consist of four components:

-print reader or iris scanner;

used to select the active matching data and produce a feature vector of the biometric;

-pares the captured biometric with an exist-ing database;

confidence in any identity matched against the person providing the biometric sample.

Such a biometric system can be used in one of two modes: either for verification or for identifica-tion. Verification describes a ‘1-to-1’ matching procedure that is used to verify a person’s identity, and therefore to confirm that an individual is who he says he is. Identification, on the other hand, is defined as ‘1-to-many’ matching, and is typically used to establish a person’s identity – that is, to determine who a person is.

A key benefit of using fingerprint analysis for biometric identification is that the informa-tion gained can be used in both ways: either to confirm or to establish someone’s identity. Plus,

the technology behind digital fingerprinting is already mature, and has been successfully used at police stations and other fixed locations for several years now.

Mobile fingerprinting for law enforcementFor those working in law enforcement, the abil-ity to identify people effectively has always been important, but the ability to identify people at the point of encounter – without having to return to the station – can bring even greater benefits.

Having this ability not only saves the police a significant amount of time, but also has an impact on virtually all aspects of operational policing. For example, by confirming someone’s identity while out in the field, the police can instantly know whether they have met a suspect before, and can also review what they know about him, such as whether he has a criminal record, whether he is likely to be armed, or to be violent, and so on.

In addition, there are several knock-on effects that make this technology very attrac-tive for law enforcement in particular. For example, mobile fingerprinting will allow for the earlier release of innocent parties with-out the need for them to attend police sta-tions. Plus, by being able to identify suspects quickly, there is no need to house suspects in cells until they can be identified. The net result is that more police officers can be kept on the street, and bureaucracy overheads can be reduced along with the number of refused charges, wrongful arrests, and subsequent detention payments and litigation.

In fact, mobile fingerprinting can offer signifi-cant gains for all parties working within the crimi-nal justice sector. Some instances where this tech-nology would bring added benefit might include:

appearance: court access to mobile finger-printing would help prevent substitutions, since it is now very common that the arrest-ing officer is not present in court, and/or that the court appearance is some time after the date of arrest, making it difficult for the officer to remember an offender’s appearance.

could be used to ensure that parties trans-ported to and from court by security person-nel are who they claim to be.

parole officers and community service super-visors to prevent substitution. Mobile fin-gerprinting also makes it much easier to verify that the correct person reports on bail – leading to improved offender compli-ance – and also gives the police the ability to help focus more quickly on the individuals of interest.

-ried out to ensure the person detained is the person originally charged with the offence.

ensure that the correct individual was released.

This multitude of uses – and high degree of flex-ibility – is what gives the idea of mobile finger-printing one of its most undisputable strengths: the ability to respond rapidly in any situation where the ability to have someone’s identity con-firmed at the point of contact is vital.

Case study: Project LANTERNAccording to an article recently published in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, a limited trial of mobile police fingerprint devices, called Project Lantern, began as far back as 2006, with 200 devices distributed and 30 000 checks performed. They were deployed in police cars using automatic number plate recognition technology in order to stop vehicles that were logged as stolen, as having no insurance/MOT, or that were simply unknown. Fingerprint checks often showed the driver was carrying fal-sified documents, or had no license, no insur-ance, or was committing other infringements.

This same article went on to say that the elec-tronic search data, encrypted and sent over pub-lic networks, was usually returned to the mobile devices within two minutes; 97% of searches were completed in five minutes. Responses are graded as ‘high’ or ‘medium’. If high, it shows the system is confident of a match; if medium, it could display up to three potential identities. The returned data includes the name, age and gender of the suspect if there is a match.

Of course, the question of cost is often raised when it comes to any kind of new technology. Compared to old-fashioned ‘wet’ prints, there

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April 2009 Biometric Technology Today

Going mobileBiometric technology looks ready to hit the road as mobile fingerprinting becomes a reality for the police, event organisers, and even theme parks. John Elliott, principal consultant with Consult Hyperion and head of the firm’s Public Sector Practice, reports.

8Biometric Technology Today April 2009

are clear cost benefits of using digital solutions for checking fingerprints, but comparing current mobile fingerprinting schemes with fixed Live Scan rolled 10-print systems will require further study.

The technology behind mobile IDIn recent years, activity in the area of electronic fingerprint scanning has been less focussed on the theory of whether fingerprinting works for ID purposes, and instead has focussed on improving the ease, accuracy and security of fingerprint capture. As a result, recent develop-ments in sensing technology have resulted in several ink-less fingerprint scanners.

Compared to the ink and paper-based methods traditionally used in law-enforcement environments, this technology is extremely easy to use, with extremely small sensors which can be fitted into laptops, mobile telephones and personal digital assistants easily. However, at this stage, some would argue that the technol-ogy surrounding mobile fingerprinting still has some room for improvement, even if the con-cept itself is compelling.

For example, at the moment, it is not unusual for just two digital fingerprints to be transmitted at a time, which means that the results will be less accurate than matches provided by the traditional ten-print method. This is typically a choice based on bandwidth, however, and on how long it would take to transmit additional digital finger-prints, and therefore not a fundamental limit.

Compared to rolled prints and ten-print cards, however, the ‘flat-print’ sensors used in mobile fingerprinting devices produce less information about a finger. As a result, auto-matic identification of images of such small fin-gerprint portions requires complex algorithms similar to the algorithms used for conventional latent fingerprint identification of the marks found at the crime scenes.

More recently, novel fingerprint capture tech-niques have been gaining attention to overcome the ease with which traditional ‘capacitance fingerprint-capture’ systems have been spoofed. Such systems – including a non-contact 3-D imaging of a whole hand without physical contact, including palm prints and all 10 fin-gerprints in a single reading – are claiming to be able to collect prints of quality equivalent to ‘rolled’ fingerprints traditionally used by police.

Project MIDASFollowing on from the success of Project LANTERN, recent news reports have revealed that every police force in the UK will soon be

equipped with mobile fingerprint scanners as part of a scheme called Project MIDAS (an acronym for Mobile Identification At Scene). As such, mobile fingerprinting will soon give police in the UK a full, mobile national capability to check identities, and perhaps even the capacity to beam images of suspects back to officers on the streets to help confirm identifications. Consult Hyperion worked closely with the police to devise the road-map for the introduction of the technology used in this scheme, and helped them to demonstrate the outline business case for conducting identity checks on people in the street.

In order to roll this technology out to the great-est number of police officers, tens of thousands of mobile readers are expected to be distributed to police forces across the UK as part of the Project MIDAS scheme. This technology is likely to be in widespread use within the next 18 months, and will eventually also be used to receive pictures of suspects, as bandwidth speeds increase.

For obvious reasons, these devices need to be robust, with both size and weight kept to a mini-mum, and yet must be able to deliver speed and accuracy. At the same time, officers don’t want to be bogged down with too many different devices, and so manufacturers will increasingly

need to focus on multi-functional devices that will help to rationalise and reduce the number of devices carried by officers.

Currently, officers have to take suspects to custody suites if they need to check fingerprints. On average, this procedure takes 67 min-utes, according to a presentation given by the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) at Biometrics 2008. By contrast, MIDAS will enable officers to perform checks on the fin-gerprints of people arrested or detained with amazing speed. Either way, the fingerprints that are gathered are compared against records on IDENT1, the national police database which holds information on 7.5 million individuals.

Additional uses of mobile fingerprintingAside from this powerful use for digital fin-gerprinting out in the field, there is a wide range of opportunities for police to use this technology in other ways. For example, mobile fingerprinting could be used on the deceased at a national disaster (such as a tsunami, for exam-ple), at the scene of a crime, on suspects for

FEATURE

This diagram shows the various points of contact governments have with people. When someone is encountered, it cannot be assumed that they have a single identity that they always use. Therefore, it might be best to treat all persons as 'unknowns' and derive their 'identity' from fundamental prin-ciples, using for example biometrics. Of course, this is not always practical due to a variety of con-straints, such as: not wishing to incur unreasonable delays; legislation such as treating all EU citizens equally; and a person's inability to provide a particular biometric sample.

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intelligence in the early part of an investigation, to check the identities of prisoners in transit, or even in a mortuary.

Biometric equipment can also enable the cost-effective addition of biometric security to police property, such as cars, radios and guns. With biometric controls in place, a passer-by would not be able to jump into a police car and drive off, or steal a police radio and listen in, as such actions would require the biometric identification of an officer to the device before it will function. This was in fact carried out as part of the Project LANTERN trials with the mobile units, which meant that officers simply needed to register their details to benefit from this additional protection.

In the US, there is already a biometric smart card standard called Personal Identity Verification (PIV) Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 201 that is cur-rently being used by Federal staff outside of the criminal justice system. Consult Hyperion rec-ommended this standard for adoption by UK Police forces as a smart ID card, and this was accepted. In the future, we believe this whole system could be joined up so that UK Police can be identified through their smart card in a mobile device and use their fingerprint stored on the card, rather than have to link back to the national fingerprint system over GPRS.

Commercial applications for mobile finger-printing

Unfortunately, as one of the most mature biometric technologies used in forensics, finger-prints still have a stigma of criminality associated with them. However, this stigma is decreasing as more and more ‘civil’ biometric systems come into the public domain such as the US-VISIT immigration control at USA borders.

Even theme parks, such as Disney World and Universal Studios in the US, have implemented fingerprint-based systems now, as a way of eliminating the ability of visitors to sell or give away admission tickets to another consumer when their visit is over. Before these biometric systems were implemented, a Universal Studios guest purchasing a discounted multi-day admis-sion ticket could, for example, use the ticket for a few days, and then sell the ticket for the remaining days’ admission to someone else.

The new system being used at these theme parks, however, requires all guests to have their fingerprint (generally, the right index finger) scanned when they enter the Park for the first time. That image is then tied to the serial number of the admission ticket. Subsequent admissions require the process to be repeated, and if the fin-gerprint in the database doesn’t match the one tied to the ticket ID, admission is refused.

A lot of people are already talking about how mobile fingerprinting could be used for the

2012 Olympics in a similar manner. As with the theme park example, it is likely that tickets will be sold to cover several different events over a number of days. So, if event organisers decide to use mobile fingerprinting when a ticket/pass is used for the first time, then Mobile ID could help to prevent the ticket being stolen and used by somebody else.

Plus, by using this technology to confirm someone’s identity at the gate, organisers can instantly know whether they have already had contact with the visitor before, and also can review what they know about them, such as whether they are someone with special needs, or a VIP in need of extra attention, or a poten-tially disruptive spectator who is likely to cause trouble. Also, at large events, police often have ‘knife arches’, which are metal detectors that spectators walk through. Mobile fingerprinting is useful here, as well, if someone is caught out and/or suspected of having a criminal record.

Managing public perceptionUnsurprisingly, the potential for large-scale biometric checks has already raised questions regarding civil liberties and privacy concerns. As a result, even though the technology to support all of these biometric applications exists right now, the real challenge will be to change behaviours, overcome objections, and maximise the benefits of

this powerful way of ensuring an accurate – and instant – way of identifying people.

After all, no matter how useful they are in terms of security, mobile biometric checks are likely to create more problems than they solve if they are not used within public acceptance, and this will depend heavily on the clarity of the ben-efits it provides society versus the potential danger it represents.

Those working in this field can help to man-age public concerns by making sure that any required limitations on the use of identification data (to prevent potential abuses) are clearly set out, well communicated to the public, and studiously adhered to. For example, it is worth noting that Mobile ID has the same informa-tion security requirements as any other data, and that includes compliance with the Data Protection Act in terms of how the data is stored, protected, and used.

With these guidelines in place and accepted, mobile fingerprinting can clearly provide not only the police, but also the organisers of public exhibi-tions, sporting events, music concerts and more with an important way of checking identities very quickly, which will mean added benefits in terms of both security and convenience for all of us.

This article was provided by John Elliott, principal

consultant with Consult Hyperion and head of the

firm’s Public Sector Practice. Tel: +44 1483 301793,

Fax: +44 1483 561 657, email, john.elliott@chyp.com,

Web: www.chyp.com

Mobile readers will be a key piece of equipment for the policeman of the future.