Heading to ISO SC 37 — Biometrics January 2024

~ Andrew Hughes

Another year, another ISO committee!  😀

I have joined the Standards Council of Canada mirror committee for SC 37 (Biometrics) and will be attending the international meetings. The hard work has begun learning the committee culture, personalities and flow of projects.

Getting started in an ISO committee involves applying for accreditation as a national standards body expert in the domain; connecting up to the wikis and email lists; attaching to the document management system; and locating the ‘active coal face’1 – the precise status of each interesting project. Not trivial. It’s the same pattern for every standards body – getting caught up takes effort.

There are six work groups within SC 37. I’ll be spending most of my time in WG 5 (Biometric Testing and Reporting) and WG 4 (Technical Implementation of Biometric Systems). WG 1 (Harmonized Biometric Vocabulary), WG 2 (Biometric Technical Interfaces), WG 3 (Biometric Data Interchange Formats) and WG 6 (Cross-Jurisdictional and Societal Aspects of Biometrics) will receive attention as and when needed.

Here are some of the projects that look immediately interesting to me. My opinion will certainly change as I get into the work 🙂

  • ISO/IEC 30107-3 — Biometric presentation attack detection — Part 3: Testing and reporting
  • ISO/IEC 30107-4:2020 — Information technology — Biometric presentation attack detection — Part 4: Profile for testing of mobile devices
  • ISO/IEC TS 19795-9:2019 — Information technology — Biometric performance testing and reporting — Part 9: Testing on mobile devices
  • ISO/IEC 20059 — Vulnerability of Biometric Recognition Systems with Respect to Morphing Attacks
  • ISO/IEC 9868 — Remote biometric identification systems — Design, development, and audit
  • ISO/IEC 29794-5 — Face image quality assessment
  • ISO/IEC TR 22116:2021 — A study of the differential impact of demographic factors in biometric recognition system performance
  • ISO/IEC 19795-10 — Quantifying biometric system performance variation across demographic groups
  • ISO/IEC 39794-5:2019 — Information technology — Extensible biometric data interchange formats — Part 5: Face image data

One observation that I must confirm: SC 37 appears to be oriented to controlled-environment biometric systems: where the operator of the system controls the sensors, hardware and software.

I believe, for now, that there are additional design requirements for the exponential-growth bring-your-own biometric sensor (on your mobile device). And this aspect is very interesting to me. My company’s product does remote ID Proofing and Verification using biometric evaluation for linking, and biometric re-verification (aka “returning user authentication”). We construct 3D face models for proof of liveness and matching. We are concerned with proven liveness and end to end device/sensor security (for mobile devices cameras and webcams).

Performance testing, presentation attack detection/performance, mobile-first and face-first topics are hot now.

I’m about to find out the level of international interest and state of standardization in these areas during the SC 37 plenary at Okayama in January 2024 – wish me luck!.

  1. Realizing that ‘active coal face’ is a dying idiom — but what is the climate-friendly replacement? Maybe the ‘code repo pull requests page’? I invite you to respond! ↩︎

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