POSE: Phase I: Cultivating OSBCE: An Open-Source Biometrics and Cybersecurity Ecosystem for Research and Innovation

Award ID: 2550150

Biometric and cybersecurity technologies play a key role in protecting digital identity systems across national defense, border security, healthcare, finance, and other applications. As these digital identity technologies connect more intricately to systems, devices and networks, they become more complex and more exposed to attacks, making it important to ensure they are reliable and secure. As different research groups implement the security of digital identity technologies, their initial datasets, tools, and evaluation methods vary, making it difficult to compare results, assess the robustness to attacks, and understand how the platforms perform for different groups of people. This project addresses these variations through the development of the Open-Source Biometrics and Cybersecurity Ecosystem (OSBCE), a shared platform that brings together tools, datasets, and evaluation methods. By encouraging shared standards, OSBCE helps avoid duplicate work and supports collaboration across academia, industry, and government. It advances secure, interoperable biometric systems that protect user privacy, strengthening public trust and supporting national priorities in cybersecurity and reliable artificial intelligence (AI). This project establishes OSBCE as a flexible and expandable platform that integrates biometric recognition, adversarial robustness evaluation, and system evaluation across different data types. Building on prior work, OSBCE combines existing tools and datasets into shared, reproducible pipelines with standard interfaces for data preparation, model testing, and evaluation under real-world conditions. The project develops evaluation methods to jointly measure accuracy, resistance to adversarial attacks, and performance across different users and environments. In parallel, it designs governance models, contributor pipelines, and community engagement mechanisms to support long-term, interdisciplinary collaboration. Through these efforts, OSBCE provides a scalable end-to-end framework for evaluating biometric systems, improving secure identity verification and strengthening the integration of biometrics with cybersecurity and reliable AI. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Florence Rabanal