ARLINGTON, VA. — Technology industry leaders agree that the U.S. government’s biometric ID card system for federal employees and contractors that features security and privacy standards for all vendors is a global trendsetter.

But security, cost and privacy hurdles remain before a similarly ambitious system could be replicated for everyday consumer use, tech experts said at a conference here Thursday.

The ID cards that meet government specifications include a facial photo, fingerprint and other personal information. Similar cards for a consumer system could be used for everything from bank transactions to withdrawing a book from the library.

Federal agencies began issuing the secure government IDs in October, and government and industry analysts are still skeptical that the project can meet a White House directive deadline of issuing cards to more than 10 million federal workers and contractors within two years.

And financial services firm Stanford Group Co.’s Washington Research Group predicts the U.S. effort will cost $1.3 billion, but other analysts expect a price tag closer to double that.

Establishing compliance standards and an implementation schedule for such a massive undertaking across public and private sectors is unprecedented compared to other nations, where individual agencies or businesses are responsible for the systems, said Kent Schneider, vice president of global business development of Northrop Grumman Corp.’s IT unit.

Northrop is among numerous contractors approved to provide technology equipment and services for U.S. agencies. Others include IBM Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp., Accenture Ltd., General Dynamics Corp., Bearingpoint Inc., Electronic Data Systems Corp., SI International Inc., Unisys Corp., Verisign Inc., L-1 Identity Solutions Inc., and Honeywell International Inc.

Britain is preparing to build a national ID system that would require collecting 13 biometrics: a facial photo, two iris scans and 10 fingerprints, Schneider said during a speech at the Advanced Identification Systems conference. Privacy concerns have been raised about what the government will use the information for, and there are cost issues, he added.

But Schneider said each individual authority can decide what is needed for a specific transaction. For example, one fingerprint and a PIN might be needed for a credit card transaction, but a 10-fingerprint match might be required for a border crossing.

The latest cost estimate for the British effort is 5.4 billion pounds, or about 10.64 billion U.S. dollars, Schneider said.

If the British government decides it wants to run and build the system, the cost would be higher than if it chooses to buy it as a service from a consortium. Currently, there are no global service providers of identity management systems, but numerous companies are interested, including Northrop Grumman. Yet it would need the help of transaction providers like Visa and MasterCard, and network providers like British Telecommunications and Cable & Wireless, he said.

Steve Riley, senior security strategist for Microsoft Corp., warned that even the best systems will have failures. “Breaches will be inevitable, we have to accept that as a a given,” he said.

On the consumer side, banks in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore are using a dual authentication system, in which customers making a purchase have a one-time password sent to their mobile phone before a transaction can be completed. U.S. financial institutions are moving toward smart cards with biometrics, which is better than a simple PIN, but “attackers modify their tactics as we try to defend against them,” Riley said.