FIDO Alliance initiates certification program for biometric authentication

The initiative is named Biometric Component Certification Program and focuses primarily on biometric subcomponents, ascertaining whether they meet certain ISO standards, ie. ISO/IEC 19795 and ISO/IEC 30107. It will also assess their capacity for Presentation Attack Detection, an increasingly important area as biometrics are more and more often used for authentication.

The FIDO Alliance asserted that it would use “accredited independent labs” to perform its assessments, however, the organization did not name any labs in particular.

FIDO is already renowned for its certification programs for its Universal Second Factor (U2F) and Universal Authentication Framework (UAF) protocols, and in recent years the alliance has established itself as a key standards body for authentication security products and services. With biometrics an increasingly critical component of authentication systems, FIDO’s branching into biometric subcomponents certification is a logical step forward.