Iris-recognition camera to be available for one-click two factor authentication: Nilekani

Former UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani said a sub $100 smartphone with an iris-recognition camera would be available in a year or two and that would allow users one-click two factor authentication - the mobile number would be one factor with the iris-based biometric authentication of Aadhaar number the second, The Times of India reported today.

"One of the big challenges in the financial sector is how to combine accuracy with security. The world over, when you do a financial transaction, you do a one factor authentication, but In India, we have a two factor authentication. It's complicated, as you have to enter something and get an OTP (one time password)," Nilekani said at the 28th International Conference on VLSI Design in Bengaluru yesterday.

Taxi hailing app Uber came under the RBI scanner recently for not using two-factor authentication, which forced the company to switch to a mobile wallet, a less convenient form since customers need to keep refilling these wallets.

"As sensors get popular and cheaper, the next generation of smartphones will have iris cameras built into them," Nilekani said.

The VLSI conference discussed in much detail the emerging internet-of-things (IoT) ecosystem. The VLSI or very-large-scale integration allows for building an integrated circuit comprising thousands of transistors can onto a single chip.

According to Nilekani, innovations in information and communication technologies (ICT) had led to emergence of many devices like smart phones or tablets that could do  fingerprint authentication using biometric sensors.

He added, by following the hour glass architecture, the UIDAI was able to build a set of financial applications to enable citizens avail the direct benefit transfer schemes into their bank accounts.

''The concept of hour glass architecture is important for scaling innovation on the application side and the technology (sensor) side, as evident from the Aadhaar project, in which we had the task of getting 1.2-billion people have a unique identification at a pace, which was sustainable and scalable,'' he said.

With Nilekani as chairman, the UIDAI had been able to provide Aadhaar number to about 730 million people till date, as its platform had been built to generate one million unique identification numbers a day for diverse applications such as cash transfers, online authentication and withdrawal of money, among others.

An Aadhaar-based attendance system for marking the presence of employees had also been implemented by the central government in its offices across the country.