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AIRPORT TECH August/September 2014 airportbusiness 33 Few airports understand this better than Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), where more than 60,000 badges are issued annually to people working inside and out on airport property. If the prospect of checking the backgrounds of the air- ports' thousands of employees weren't daunting enough, this matter is further complicated by the fact that its $4.11-billion capital improvement program generates more than 40,000 local jobs, bringing many new faces to the airport each and every day. "This multi-billion dollar capital construction program requires hundreds and hundreds of con- struction workers, concessionaires and trades- men of all types to be badged," says Dom Nessi, deputy executive director and chief information officer at Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA). "This fact has exponentially increased the work- load in our badging office. They have done a pretty good job of keeping up, but the workload is enormous because of the number of people coming through." A decade-old, legacy credentialing system, which had been patched together over the years, further muddied the process. Nessi describes this system as inefficient and inaccurate. "It required our credentialing staff to enter the same information on multiple screens, creating a good chance for inducing errors into the system," he says, explaining that the software lacked internal business rules and editing capabilities. The airport set aside $8.3 million to replace its tired and dated badging and identification system in an effort to address the credentialing challenges the LAX modernization program, which consists of more than 20 individual proj- ects, presented the airport's badging office. And in August, this new system, four years in the making, went live. "We did a soft launch for a couple of weeks before using it at full capacity," Nessi says, noting it is too soon to know exactly how much time it trims from the process. He predicts it make cre- dentialing at least 5 percent faster. The second phase, which will automate workflow between the badging office and its customers, will likely speed the process even more. Though airports cannot do much to tighten the time required to vet an employee through approved clearinghouse agencies, Phillip Brodt, vice president of New Orleans-based GCR Inc., says airports can control the time it takes on their end through the use of multibiometric credential- ing technology and processing software. "Newer technologies allow them to speed up the process and get information flowing back and forth more quickly," he says. MULTIMODAL BIOMETRICS ImageWare Systems Inc. (IWS), a California- based leader in multimodal biometric security solutions, and GCR Inc. partnered to create LAX's new biometrically enabled identity management and credentialing system. The system utilizes ImageWare's Quick Capture multibiometric cap- ture application as well as multiple identity man- agement and credential issuance modules that are part of the company's SOA-based Identity Service Bus (ISB) suite. "IWS was a subcontractor and partner in the project," says Brodt. "We were the primary devel- oper and they provided the biometrics." Brodt points out GCR selected IWS as a part- ner because of the firm's strong foundation in biometrics identity management and its work on the Canadian Air Transportation Safety Administration (CATSA) credentialing system. The partners based LAX's credentialing structure on the CATSA system, Brodt explains. This system includes a Restricted Access Identity Card (RAIC) software application that validates airport worker identities through biometrics before permitting entry into restricted areas at Canada's 29 major airports. The RAIC system uses smart cards containing fingerprints and bio- metrics to track secure access for airport workers. A smart chip stores a unique identifier used to confirm user credentials and privileges. There are some inherent differences in the systems due to variations in CATSA and U.S. TSA credentialing requirements. The United States requires each airport to vet and badge its own employees, and lacks a nationwide standard for this process. "As a result, each airport has its own unique flavor for how it handles criminal history, deals with access privileges and things like that," says Brodt. "In Canada, there is just one background check done for a person, and it's applicable to all airports." Both systems rely on multimodal biomet- ric capture, which is capturing multiple types of biometrics, whether face, fingerprint, hand geometry, finger vein, palm vein, voice or DNA. The LAX system grabs iris and fingerprints, but the IWS software is capable of capturing up to 10 different biometric types. "The advantage of a multimodal biometric system is that there are a percentage of people who have difficulty capturing their fingerprints," says Tom Hoyt, director of strategic alliances at IWS. "Beyond that, depending on how the biometrics are being used, certain biometrics work better than others." He adds that using multimodal biometrics beefs up security at the point of entry. "Having a badge linked to a person's identity through a bio- metric and requiring a match to occur between that person and the biometric on the card is a vastly more secure way of insuring that the per- son going through the door is the right person. If you don't have a biometric on your card, the only thing between an authorized individual, and someone else getting in the door, is a PIN number, which can be easily compromised." The LAX system relies solely on fingerprint captures, but the airport is storing iris scans with each individual's record for future use, says Nessi. He points out that with more than 1,000 access control doors to retrofit for biometrics and thou- sands of employees needing iris scans, using this biometric won't happen for a few years. STREAMLINED SCREENING "The age of the siloed badging system sitting in the security badge office by itself is going away in favor of a more robust credentialing system A irports make it their mission to know who you are. Passengers show their identification and boarding passes at multiple points throughout their jour- ney to verify identity. But confirming the identities of those working at the airport is equally important.