Aware (News - Alert), Inc., a provider of imaging and biometrics software, announced that it has supplied client- and server-based software products for the “PIV” employee credentialing system of a large U.S. federal government agency.

According to company sources the software is part of a solution that was deployed by ICF International (News - Alert) subsidiary Jacob & Sundstrom, an IT services company specializing in PIV systems. This system is capable of providing enterprise-wide enrollment of federal employees besides offering centralized data structuring and workflow for issuance of PIV credentials.

Aware’s Universal Registration Client or URC is a software application which can perform assisted enrollment of biographic data, facial images, fingerprints, identity documents, and digital written signatures.  This enrollment data is forwarded to Aware’s Biometric Services Platform known as BioSP which is a SOA application server used to aggregate, store, process, and disseminate the enrolled data for various purposes like background checks and PIV card personalization.  

URC and BioSP work in tandem to enable a platform of GSA (News - Alert)-approved software components that fulfill the biometric functionality requirements of their PIV system.  Also the Aware system provides ICF International a framework for customization and quick deployment, said company sources.  

David Simonetti, vice president for ICF International said, “Aware offers a broad biometric software platform that utilizes highly modular building blocks of biometric functionality.”

“As a focused system integrator, this model suited our needs ideally because we needed GSA-approved biometrics software that fulfilled PIV mandates and yet could be quickly customized and deployed in a way that accommodated our customer’s legacy systems and specific workflow requirements. The Aware solution also addresses capture hardware obsolescence risks that can impact system maintenance costs going forward, a key factor for us,” Simonetti added.

Company sources explained that the URC is a biometric enrollment application that can firstly search the agency’s identity management system or IDMS for pre-enrolled biographic data records.  It leverages Aware’s biometric SDKs to perform autocapture of facial images and fingerprints and amend these records with the images and fingerprint minutiae templates.

It also takes into account “I9” identity document scans and digital written signatures.  These biometric SDKs make the URC application suitable for several biometric capture hardware devices without affecting the operation or performance of the application.

BioSP helps in storing image data and integrates with agency’s IDMS to associate biometric data with identities that are stored there. PIV-compliant fingerprint template objects are sent by the BioSP to the IDMS for card personalization.  It also creates fingerprint transactions for background checks.

Aware’s software products are used by system integrators as they provide advanced biometric image and data processing functionality in modular and flexible formats.  Company sources added that its software components are FIPS 201-compliant and GSA-approved for face and fingerprint enrollment, fingerprint template generation and matching, and PIV card reading and writing.