Use cases target children to seniors
15 January, 2013
category: Digital ID, Government, Library
AAMVA
As the organization representing driver license issuers, the American Association for Motor Vehicle Administrators is no stranger to issuing identity documents. It is leading a group of private industry and government partners to implement and pilot the Cross Sector Digital Identity Initiative. At its core, the system seeks to move the task of being carded from physical locations to the online world with vetting, authentication and biometrics.
In addition to AAMVA, the participants in this $1.6 million pilot include the Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, Biometric Signature ID, CA Technologies, Microsoft and AT&T.
The idea for the project came out of an American National Standards Institute Working Group on identity vetting, says Geoff Slagle, director of Identity Management at AAMVA. “There was a workshop that was looking at this question of ‘is there something we can be doing better to figure out if people are really who they claim to be,'” he explains.
This pilot goes to the core of what the national strategy is trying to accomplish building a system that links an identity to an individual. “This continues to be a challenge for people that issue credentials–really knowing that people are in fact who they claim to be,” Slagle says. “Statistics back up the idea that most people are solid citizens but we also have a fair number that try to defraud us when it comes to obtaining a driver license.”
The vast majority of citizens deal with driver license issuing agencies in person. The goal is to try to create a way for them to take some of those activities online. “Before that can happen, the current system needs to be changed,” Slagle says.”
Though it may sound simple, the actual implementation has many components. The pilot will involve the verification of information about an individual and then issue a credential to enable trusted transactions. “It will play a role in helping to build a higher level of assurance credential that the individual would be able to use inside of a particular ecosystem,” Slagle says.
After enrollment and vetting the system will bind the identity and attributes to the individual with a biometric enrollment, Slagle says. “Someone has a credential that you can have better confidence in because of the vetting process, and they have some kind of biometric that binds them to that credential,” he explains.
The AAMVA team is using biometric technology from Biometric Signature ID. It’s deployed as a Web service enabling users to enroll using their mouse, stylus, or touchpad. BioSig-ID captures the speed, direction, length and other unique characteristics of an individual’s signature and stores the enrollment profile in a secure database. Going forward, the individual can authenticate for online transactions in seconds through signature verification.