IAMPASS: IOTA Tangle’s Biometric Identity Authentication System Using DLT

IAMPASS – IOTA’s Biometric Authentication System

The IOTA Foundation has announced that its Tangle blockchain ecosystem will introduce a new biometric authentication feature that uses an individual's palm vein pattern as a means of identification. The solution, called IAMPASS proof of Concept (PoC), is among many of the new functionalities in IOTA’s platform that is designed for Smart Cities.

Nowadays, it is evident that centralized identity service platforms are incapable of guaranteeing the security and integrity of user data. This is because their access control mechanism is vulnerable and are constantly breached by malicious hackers. A viable and reliable alternative to these systems is a biometric authentication system such as the one developed by IOTA. Due to the incorporation of blockchain technology, the IAMPASS solution offers data security at affordable costs by removing fees levied by third-party security providers.

The IAMPASS solution will scan the pattern of the veins inside a user’s palm and generate a unique identity for easy verification. This technology is applicable in areas that require high security, such as airports, stadia, data centres and many others. In such areas, the solution will generate unalterable audit trails using dedicated Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) streams form access points.

According to Dominic Schiener, a co-founder of the IOTA Foundation, identity is one of the most significant challenges worldwide. The inability to easily authenticate the identity of people is a leading cause of misunderstandings between consumers and service providers. The IAMPASS PoC solves this issue by giving users a portable identity that they have full control over. Dominic believes that the development of identity solutions such as this could instigate the mass adoption of blockchain technology.

On the other hand, Toan Nguyen, the director of business development at IOTA, blockchain technology is fundamental in the concept of smart city and other digitalization initiatives. The inherent security and data management features of distributed ledgers make them important for the aforementioned purposes. Toan believes that the IOTA Tangle is primed for security applications involving digital identity of users. He concluded by expressing hope that IAMPAAS will lead the next phase of digital identity management for areas that maintain high-security standards.

IOTA is an open-source platform that fuses blockchain with other technologies such as the Internet of Things to overcome the shortcomings of the former. Currently, scalability and transaction fees are the major inhibitors of the mass adoption of blockchain technology. For this reason, the IOTA Tangle is based on Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) and MAM, technologies that are better equipped to comfortably scale with an increasing number of users, unlike blockchain. Nino Ulrich, the developer of IAMPASS, revealed that they settled on IOTA due to its scalability and lack of miner transaction fees.