Pocket-sized, portable, private: the plusID Personal Biometric Token

“But with this difference. We know for sure who’s behind the wheel.”

The price per user of the multi-function plusID ranges between $115 for the basic (USB) version and $150 for a unit with options. Gate communication is an option, as is Bluetooth-enabled. (By way of comparison, Petze mentioned an independent study by the research firm Gartner that found enterprise-size organizations spending between $150 and $250 per year per person for password management.) For not much over $100, an employee can be equipped with a securely stored and encrypted personal credential that replaces both passwords and access cards and, if lost or misappropriated, does no one else any good whatever. “It doesn’t make much of a target,” observed Petze, who also called attention to an aspect of ID by biometrics that might be termed “the hygiene factor.” “By invitation, we visited a company in New York City,” he recounted. “We were told that they’d already deployed biometrics but were interested in the plusID. We saw why. Alongside every biometric reader was a spray can of Lysol. The employees found those things so disgusting that they were spraying them before every use.”

If this seems like a bit of hyper-sensitivity, it probably would not to a three-star general responsible for designing systems that would be used in response to a potential terrorist biological event. Transmission of potential bio-agents by requiring people to touch conventional fixed-mount biometric devices would be a danger. The plusID might have been created expressly for such a scenario: biometric identity verification without users having to touch anything mounted to the building. The plusID product family, launched in late 2007, is seeing adoption in both commercial and government applications. Having recently added a suite of accessory software products to help small businesses employ plusID, Privaris is in the technology demonstration phase with a product called bioBASE, which works with Government HSPD-12 cards such as PIV, TWIC, FRAC, and CAC.

As described by Petze, bioBASE effectively combines the concept of personal, mobile biometric identity verification with the new standard Government identity cards. bioBASE may be thought of as an intelligent badge holder. It reads the holder’s ID card and provides an on-board biometric sensor, allowing the individual to verify identity against the card. After biometric confirmation of identity, the device interacts with the existing security infrastructure in the same way as the plusID personal biometric token. With bioBASE, the need to duplicate the enrollment process at each site or installation is eliminated. Because it performs local matching versus matching of the user’s biometrics with a centralized database, it overcomes one of the challenges to large-scale systems. bioBASE has been designed to utilize FIPs-approved biometric sensor and fingerprint matching algorithm.”The bioBASE technology effectively enables the new generation of HSPD12 identity cards to be used with existing legacy systems,” said John Petze. “It extends the capabilities of those cards, enabling them to perform transactions that they are not capable of on their own.”

John Petze

John Petze is president and CEO of Privaris, Inc. a company specializing in identity verification solutions for logical and physical access control applications. The company’s products apply the power and security of fingerprint biometrics to everyday life while protecting personal privacy. Petze has served in a variety of senior technical and management positions with manufacturers of hardware and software in his 25-plus year career, most recently as president and CEO of Tridium, Inc. a software company specializing in device to enterprise applications, now a division of Honeywell. His experience spans hardware and software development, networking and Internet technologies in the application of automation and control systems for facility management, energy management, access control and security. He is a cum laude graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts; is a frequent speaker at industry trade events; and has authored numerous papers and articles.