The Pentagon Has a Big Plan to Solve Identity Verification in Two Years
The Pentagon Has a Big Plan to Solve Identity
Verification in Two Years
By Joseph Marks MAY 16, 2018 04:52 PM ET
The Defense Department is funding a project that
officials say could revolutionize the way companies, federal agencies and the
military itself verify that people are who they say they are and it could be
available in most commercial smartphones within two years.
The technology, which will be embedded in smartphones’
hardware, will analyze a variety of identifiers that are unique to an
individual, such as the hand pressure and wrist tension when the person holds a
smartphone and the person’s peculiar gait while walking, said Steve Wallace,
technical director at the Defense Information Systems Agency.
Organizations that use the tool can combine those
identifiers to give the phone holder a “risk score,” Wallace said. If the risk
score is low enough, the organization can presume the person is who she says
she is and grant her access to sensitive files on the phone or on a connected
computer or grant her access to a secure facility. If the score’s too high,
she’ll be locked out.
Nextgov spoke with Wallace on the sidelines of a DISA press
conference during a cybersecurity event hosted by the Armed Forces
Communications and Electronics Association.
The project, which is being developed by a private
company with DISA funding, grew out of a years-long Pentagon effort to rid the
department of the cumbersome common access cards, called CAC cards. Troops and
civilian Pentagon employees have used CAC cards for years to enter bases and
digitally verify their identities for department networks.
The new hardware tool will use the same principle as CAC
cards, sharing encrypted information with a machine to prove a person’s
identity, Wallace said. Unlike CAC cards, though, it will be able to
continuously gather and verify that identifying information. The tool will also
be embedded in a device the person is already carrying.
The company developing the system, which Wallace declined
to name, will deliver about 75 prototypes to DISA this fall, he said.
Once all the bugs have been worked out of the prototypes,
major companies will begin embedding the necessary tools inside the computer
chips that power smartphones, he said. From there, the smartphone makers themselves
will have to update phones to use the tool.
The technology should be commercially available within a
couple of years, Wallace said. He declined to say which smartphone and
chipmakers planned to participate in the project, but said the capability will
be available “in the vast majority of mobile devices.”
It will be up to phone makers to decide whether to make
the capability available and up to organizations whether to use it, he said.
DISA gathered information from some private-sector
organizations, including in the financial sector, to ensure the verification
tool also meets their needs, he said.
“We foresee it being used quite widely,” he said.
Another identifier that will likely be built into the
chips is a GPS tracker that will store encrypted information about a person’s
movements, Wallace said. The verification tool would analyze historical
information about a person’s locations and major, recent anomalies would raise
the person’s risk score.
The tool would be separate from the GPS function used by
mapping and exercise apps, he said.
The tool does not include biometric information, such as
a thumbprint or eye scans at this point, Wallace said, because DISA judged that
existing commercial applications of biometric information are too easy to spoof.
The Pentagon may reconsider biometric indicators if the
state of the art improves, he said.
JRSS is Too S-L-O-W
Also during Wednesday’s press conference, DISA officials
acknowledged some performance issues for tools that military units are storing
inside the Joint Regional Security Stacks, or JRSS. The JRSS is an early phase
of a planned Defense Department-wide computer cloud.
In general, digital tools that the services put into the
cloud are still functioning and aren’t losing any data, but it is taking too
long for data to transfer from the cloud to the user, DISA Operations Director
David Bennett told reporters.
“It’s simply an issue of not performing as quickly as
applications need to,” he said.
The latency issues have led the Army, which has been
ahead of other services in transferring information to JRSS, to “reschedule and
re-phase” some of those transitions, DISA Director Vice Adm. Nancy Norton,
said.
No Comment on DISA’s Fate
Norton declined to comment on language in the House
version of the National Defense Authorization Act that would transfer many of
DISA’s technology contracting and management duties to other parts of the
Defense Department.
Norton told reporters she was “very familiar with the
discussion and various versions of the language,” but that the agency “doesn’t
comment on proposed legislation.”
When a reporter asked later about reports that some DISA
functions are already being transferred to U.S. Cyber Command, a public affairs
officer said the question was out of the scope of the press conference.
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