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The IOTA Foundation has just announced plans to power a biometric authentication system which uses a person’s palm vein pattern to verify their identity. Labeled the IAMPASS Proof of Concept, the system would utilize IOTA’s Tangle, an open source, digital ledger technology.

IAMPASS technology scans the vein structure of a person’s hand to create a unique, verifiable identity. It allows each individual to create audit trails for access to high-security environments or permissioned facilities, such as smart car charging platforms, as well as for asset management and other environments that require secure identification.

By using a unique biometric identifier, users would be able to manage online accounts, thwart identity theft and control who has access to their data.

Co-founder and co-chair of the IOTA Foundation, Dominick Schiener, explains the importance of identity verification,

“Identity is still one of the biggest unsolved problems today, as the inability to easily identify, verify and authenticate causes significant friction for users and services providers worldwide. This is why we are excited about IAMPASS Proof of Concept, which uses the IOTA permissionless distributed ledger to make identity not only portable, but also give users assess and ownership over their own data. With the maturation of identity solutions like these, we will see the IOTA ecosystem providing a key technical puzzle piece for the adoption of distributed ledgers.”

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IOTA’s director of business development & cloud platform, Toan Nguyen, adds,

“Distributed ledger technologies are becoming a key component of new smart city and transformative digitalization initiatives, especially with regard to data management and security. The unique design of the IOTA Tangle makes it ideal for the emerging security applications of digital identity and personal data in these connected environments. Together, we expect the IOTA ecosystem and IAMPASS to help drive the next phase of digital identity management for high secure environments like data centers and in the smart city.”

IOTA is one of many development teams in pursuit of identity solutions. Microsoft, for example, just released a white paper detailing plans to utilize blockchain tech to create decentralized IDs.

IAMPASS is the most recent of many developments from IOTA as they try to build on their Smart City initiative.