The Office of Legislative Counsel, which is the legislative drafting service of the U.S. House of Representatives, has begun deploying biometric authentication software on its computers.

SAFLINK Corporation is the biometics vendor providing the solution, the SAF2000, which supports and enhances Windows networks, providing an efficient solution to password-related problems, and allowing administrators to focus on more important IT issues.

SAF2000 supports authentication through iris recognition, finger image identification, speaker verification, and facial recognition. It offers an event log for recording enrollment, changes to user profiles, workstation updates, and account deletions; it supports multiple databases and directory service protocols for secure storage of user profiles; it offers encrypted biometric algorithms designed to use the maximum number of available bits from the operating system; and it comes with a developers' toolkit for incorporating biometric identification into custom applications.

“To our knowledge, this is the first initiative in the House or Senate that uses biometric authentication to provide information security.  It is an important validation of the value of biometric technology for Government applications,” said Walter Hamilton, vice president of business development at SAFLINK.  “We believe that this is a significant opportunity for SAFLINK, and we hope that the implementation at the OLC will lead to additional contracts in the House and Senate.”

“The Office of Legislative Counsel arrived at its computer security solution after an exhaustive operational testing period,” said Lynne Richardson, office administrator for the Office of the Legislative Counsel. “The Office believes it has selected a system that will adequately protect the files and working documents entrusted to it as it discharges its duties for the U.S. House of Representatives.”

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