Mumbai, Sept 9: A new face authentication software development kit (SDK) has been designed by UIDAI to simplify Aadhaar authentication for partner institutions and reduce longstanding geofencing restrictions that have limited its use for Indians travelling and living overseas.
This was stated by Neelkanth Mishra, Chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) at an event here.
Mishra explained that the new SDK will allow partner banks and businesses to run Aadhaar authentication locally on their own servers, rather than routing requests through UIDAI’s central systems.
“The problem with removing geofencing is, then you are vulnerable,” he said, adding “It’s critical infrastructure. And of course, we see hundreds of attacks every day. We have safeguards.”
He described a model where authentication runs on the bank’s own server rather than UIDAI’s central infrastructure, so the bank secures its own local process and the exposure doesn’t pass back to UIDAI’s systems.
This comes as Aadhaar authentication volumes climb sharply from seven crore transactions a day a few years ago to roughly 10 crores today with UIDAI preparing infrastructure to handle 25 to 30 crore daily authentications.
Mishra noted that more than 600 entities currently use the platform, with the Aadhaar app nearing 6 crore downloads.
On growing institutional adoption, he said, “Telangana police is now insisting that a lot of the verification they do requires the Aadhaar app itself, and that gets people to download the Aadhaar app.”
On UIDAI’s underlying philosophy, he added, “Aadhaar is only a database. We make sure that we are very good at what we do, but we also don’t want any scoping. We must be good at having the identity data of 1.44 billion and provide it in a safe, secure, and trusted way. We would like to become the infrastructure that no one knows.” (BVI)
