IOTA Foundation, a non-profit foundation focused on distributed ledger technology (DLT) and permissionless ecosystem development, announced today that its open source Tangle technology will power a new biometric authentication system that uses a person’s palm vein pattern as means of identification. The IAMPASS Proof of Concept (PoC) is yet another milestone for IOTA’s developing ecosystem and another piece of the organization’s evolving Smart City initiative.
Identity + DLT
Enterprise leaders are quickly discovering that traditional centralized identity service providers are no longer able to offer the access or control required to effectively manage and secure growing levels of user data from connected and digital devices. As organizations look to an innovative alternative, bio-identity, verified and managed on a distributed ledger, provides a system for immediate, reliable and secure digital identity verification. Moreover, the system provides significant cost savings for businesses by eliminating authentication and verification fees charged by third-party security services.
Using biometric technology, IAMPASS technology scans the structure of the veins inside a person’s hands to create a unique identity for each user, enabling easy authentication and verification. The technology offers an advanced solution for generating immutable audit trails for high-security environments, including data centers, airports, and stadiums, by employing dedicated MAM (Masked Authenticated Messaging) streams from access points. Other use cases include facility access points, smart car charging, asset management and a plethora of other identity-dependent environments.
“Identity is still one of the biggest unsolved problems today, as the inability to easily identify, verify and authenticate causes significant friction for users and service providers worldwide. This is why we are excited about the IAMPASS Proof of Concept, which uses the IOTA permissionless distributed ledger to make identity not only portable, but also give users access and ownership over their own data. With the maturation of identity solutions like these, we will see the IOTA ecosystem providing a key technical puzzle piece for the adoption of distributed ledgers.”
“Distributed ledger technologies are becoming a key component of new smart city and transformative digitalization initiatives, especially with regard to data management and security. The unique design of the IOTA Tangle makes it ideal for the emerging security applications of digital identity and personal data in these connected environments. Together, we expect the IOTA ecosystem and IAMPASS to help drive the next phase of digital identity management for high secure environments like data centers and in the smart city.”
This announcement comes on the heels of another recent advancement for IOTA in the development of smart cities worldwide – IOTA and the European smart city consortium, +CityxChange, received the Green light from the EU Commission to become a new smart city lighthouse project, earlier this summer.
Beyond Blockchain
IOTA is an open-source distributed ledger technology, that moves beyond blockchain. It has been designed to be scalable with zero-cost transaction fees and data integrity to power the future of the Internet of Things, machines and identity solutions. Scalability and feeless transactions are mandatory for any identity-related solution and real-world mass adoption. These factors have been the major bottleneck for blockchain-based DLT. For any identity solution to be viable, it has to handle billions of transactions per day, especially if it includes a human ID as well as a machine ID – a source of data which will be prevalent in the near future. The IOTA Tangle, based on Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and Masked Authenticated Messaging, has emerged as a powerful solution to address the real-world challenges of today.
“We started our evaluation process of several DLTs in early 2016, including Ethereum, NXT, Waves, Steem and more. We have gathered real experience and built several prototypes for completely diverse use cases, which allowed us to discover the pain points of many DLTs. The IOTA Tangle’s unique features such as the lack of miners or transaction fees, and its intrinsic scalability, make it a natural choice for us.”