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GCN Home > 09/12/07 web stories

TSA issues list of qualified screening products

By Patrick Marshall

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Three years after being directed to establish a qualified-products list for airport screening programs, the Transportation Security Administration has released its first list of such products.

Of seven products that vendors submitted for testing, four were approved for the list. Among them were two solutions — Bioscrypt’s V-Station and Cogent Systems’ ID-Gate — that combine keypads with fingerprint and smart-card scanners. Two fingerprint sensors from Lumidigm also won approval.

Rick Lazarick, chief scientist at Computer Sciences Corp.’s Identity Labs and a consultant to TSA, said the testing was run directly by the agency but performed by International Biometric Group, a private company based in New York and London.

“The testing itself was limited to [an] indoor, controlled scenario test,” Lazarick told attendees at the Biometric Consortium Conference in Baltimore. “The manufacturer set up the equipment and established the threshold that it wanted to meet.”

The test involved 250 volunteer subjects. Guidelines set by TSA required successful products to deliver results with false-acceptance and -rejection rates of less than 1 percent. Transaction time had to be less than 6 seconds.

TSA funded the preparation of laboratories to make sure they were ready to accept the devices, Lazarick said. Manufacturers were required to pay a fee of $25,000. “That fee-for-service model will go into the future,” he added.

More news on related topics: Authentication / Identity Management, Hardware, Homeland Security, Software Applications