IIIT Hyderabad exploring a research project to build components for Aadhaar authentication

Researchers at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in Hyderabad are working on a research proposal to make key components for biometric testing and software that could someday be part of the Aadhaar authentication system. P J Narayanan, professor and director of IIIT, Hyderabad, confirmed this to Business Today. Currently, some of these components are being supplied to Aadhaar by some leading players globally. Apparently, the government seems to have kept a system of multiple vendors with built-in redundancy and consistency checks.

"We are trying to put together a research programme with a team of academic and engineering capabilities that can contribute towards building some of the key components for the biometric authentication that Aadhaar uses. We could do this by leveraging our academic expertise in the related areas such as fingerprint matching and iris matching," he says.

Calling the system of Aadhaar quite robust and one that has multiple vendors offering the components, Narayanan says, since at the moment there is no Indian supplier for some of these key authentication components, they want support from the government and explore this further and build components that could perhaps someday find acceptance by Aadhaar. These could include components that go into the making of finger print, iris matching, face recognition, biometric search and de-duplication algorithms.

"It is currently a research problem for us and our idea is to perhaps seek government backing." He clarifies that the aim is not to question the system we have in place, which we feel is quite robust with built-in safeguards, but given our "academic expertise in these and explore the possibility of taking it to a proof of concept stage and subsequently come up with our own components."

He says, it is working on a proposal that it wants to puts to the government and seek its support. However, in case, someday, if all of this fructifies and the software and components that are currently supplied by global players are to be replaced by the software and components developed indigenously, will there be any disruptions on account of software migration? Narayanan says, already there are multiple vendors and we are not hoping to seek any change but the idea is to emerge as an additional supplier but one that is indigenous and leveraging local research capabilities. The key point, he says is that they have the fundamental academic capability and now want to use it to build a product capability.