IOTA Foundation, a non-profit foundation focused on distributed ledger technology (DLT) and permissionless ecosystem development, announced today that its open source Tangle technology will power a new biometric authentication system that uses a person’s palm vein pattern as means of identification. The IAMPASS Proof of Concept (PoC) is yet another milestone for IOTA’s developing ecosystem and another piece of the organization’s evolving Smart City initiative.

Identity + DLT

Enterprise leaders are quickly discovering that traditional centralized identity service providers are no longer able to offer the access or control required to effectively manage and secure growing levels of user data from connected and digital devices. As organizations look to an innovative alternative, bio-identity, verified and managed on a distributed ledger, provides a system for immediate, reliable and secure digital identity verification. Moreover, the system provides significant cost savings for businesses by eliminating authentication and verification fees charged by third-party security services.

Using biometric technology, IAMPASS technology scans the structure of the veins inside a person’s hands to create a unique identity for each user, enabling easy authentication and verification. The technology offers an advanced solution for generating immutable audit trails for high-security environments, including data centers, airports, and stadiums, by employing dedicated MAM (Masked Authenticated Messaging) streams from access points. Other use cases include facility access points, smart car charging, asset management and a plethora of other identity-dependent environments.

This announcement comes on the heels of another recent advancement for IOTA in the development of smart cities worldwide – IOTA and the European smart city consortium, +CityxChange, received the Green light from the EU Commission to become a new smart city lighthouse project, earlier this summer.

Beyond Blockchain

IOTA is an open-source distributed ledger technology, that moves beyond blockchain. It has been designed to be scalable with zero-cost transaction fees and data integrity to power the future of the Internet of Things, machines and identity solutions. Scalability and feeless transactions are mandatory for any identity-related solution and real-world mass adoption. These factors have been the major bottleneck for blockchain-based DLT. For any identity solution to be viable, it has to handle billions of transactions per day, especially if it includes a human ID as well as a machine ID – a source of data which will be prevalent in the near future. The IOTA Tangle, based on Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and Masked Authenticated Messaging, has emerged as a powerful solution to address the real-world challenges of today.