Congratulations to Richard, Mike and Gareth for EU-funded PIDaaS project

Congratulations to Dr Richard Guest,Professor Mike Fairhurst and Dr Gareth Howells, joint investigators from EDA and one of 9 partners from 6 countries in the EU-funded PIDaaS project, which aims to create an innovative identity management service, integrating cutting-edge biometric and mobile technologies and management platforms.

Everyday, several methods of online identification and authentication are used to confirm the identity of a person in order to protect physical and digital information. Biometrics identifiers – distinctive and measureable characteristics that describe individuals – have been widely used in different authentication systems, but the wider adoption of biometrics in mobile services has not yet been successfully implemented. The PIDaaS (Private IDentity as a Service) Consortium announces its solution providing all information about the project on the newly launched website: www.pidaas.eu

During the next 30 months the PIDaaS project intends to develop a robust, flexible, scalable and easy to integrate service for identity assurance of users with the help of pseudo-bioidentities in mobile devices.

Biometric data, as main factor to guarantee identity, will be paired with other metadata (relating to hardware, software and network) to better ensure the certainty of each authentication request. Moreover, PIDaaS will add biometric template protection schemes (BTPS) to avoid the risks connected with other classical solution and to ensure irreversibility, revocability, as well as non connectability and renewability of the authentication.

This new technology will bring real advantages for both citizens and internet application providers. Final users have the control of how their information can be used and by whom, and, at the same time, internet application providers can easily integrate the biometric authentication into their remote identification processes.

The project started in July 2014, and involves: CSI-Piemonte (Italy), BANTEC (Spain), BDigital (Spain), RICOH (Spain), Fraunhofer IGD (Germany), University of Kent (UK), E-Bros (Lithuania), TICSalut (Spain) and Gjøvik University College (Norway).