Innovation & Identity Management: Key Takeaways from FedID 2022

Earlier this month, Dignari attended the 2022 Federal Identity Forum & Exposition (FedID), providing an opportunity to engage with some of the world’s leading experts in aviation innovation and security, digital transformation, and identity management. This event brought together subject matter experts across the industry to collaborate and champion new ideas, technology solutions, and innovation efforts that improve the future of the end-to-end passenger experience and explore new opportunities to enhance our nation’s security and prosperity. 

The FedID conference is regarded as the U.S. Government’s primary outreach and collaboration event for the worldwide identity community, providing an immersive environment for identity professionals within the federal government, private sector, and academia. FedID aims to bring together a vibrant community of key identity experts to exchange information, enhance public-private collaboration, and solve the federal government’s toughest identity challenges. 

The conference was held in Atlanta on Sept 6-9, and featured sessions focused on interagency and public-private identity matters. Session highlights included the role of identity in modern society, authoritative sources of USG identities, overcoming misinformation, and the criticality of the soft sciences in identity system planning.

PRIVACY CONCERNS

As digital identity management and contactless biometrics efforts progress—within both industry and government—one of the most commonly voiced concerns from FedID was how to mitigate potential issues and/or mistrust regarding overall privacy. With increased public attention and misinformation surrounding facial recognition technology, many panels discussed the importance of transitioning marketing efforts to providing educational resources and creating opportunities for open dialogue to continue increasing acceptance. Many industry leaders currently involved in executing contactless biometrics confirmed that the data they are finding continues to show proof of overall high public acceptance rates, once users opt-in, and/or have become more familiar with the new contactless process. 

As leaders in bringing this technology to the aviation industry, TSA and CBP remain open and transparent to the public on how facial recognition data is being used—including retention periods and the opt-in nature of the programs. Additionally, the agencies provide resources on their respective biometrics landing pages (CBP and TSA) and hold roundtable discussions and demonstrations on this technology for external stakeholders to address any additional questions. 

Most previous technology concerns were identified years earlier, allowing developers the time to alter the algorithms to increase their accuracy and minimize bias. Overall, facial comparison technology has proven to be a much more accurate method of verifying an individual versus relying on manual checks, which are more prone to error. 

A recent vendor test conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found significant gains in accuracy. The seven top-performing facial matching algorithms could successfully identify at least 99.5% of passengers the first time around if the database contained at least one passenger image. The most accurate face recognition algorithms demonstrated the capability to confirm passenger identities while making very few errors. Demographic differences in the dataset had little effect on the results.

ZERO-TRUST ARCHITECTURE

Another essential theme of discussion at FedID focused on “zero-trust” architecture and the recent implementation of the President’s Executive Order (EO) 14028 on “Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity.” This EO charges multiple agencies with enhancing cybersecurity through various initiatives and mandates agency adoption of multifactor authentication (MFA) and implementation of the zero-trust architecture. Zero-trust is a security framework that removes any implied trust and instead focuses on evaluating each connection or activity in near real-time based on access policies. 

Most panels provided updates on improvements to their cybersecurity efforts through this mandated initiative. There was continued discussion and brainstorming about how these changes may affect or impact the individuals, programs, and/or potential data transfers as more data moves to the cloud.  

CLOSING 

As Dignari continues to focus on delivering mission-critical solutions and emerging technologies that both maximize effectiveness and build advantageous programs, it is vital to our team—and our client’s success—to ensure that we actively engage in these collaboration communities. Overall, we achieve more as a shared collective, and events such as FedID are essential to maintaining a spirit of innovation and encouraging an open dialogue with public industry and government experts.