Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Sometime next year, the OS/400 platform could get its first biometric fingerprint-recognition application. Tangent Solutions, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, company that writes software for the financial services industry, is working with IBM's Rochester labs to port Security First's Ethentica Biometric Trust Engine from Linux to OS/400. Though the port is in its early stages, Tangent is excited about the prospect of bringing the software to what it considers the most secure operating system in the industry.

Tangent Solutions plans to integrate the Ethentica Biometric Trust Engine with its other two software offerings, iXchange and ACES, which Tangent is also working toward porting to OS/400. iXchange is an credit-checking application that pulls data from the big three credit agencies, Equifax, Trans Union, and Experian. ACES is a quality control application for mortgage bankers that helps to sniff out fraud. Tangent has already ported iXchange, a C++ application, to OS/400, and is undergoing alpha testing for that product. It expects to start the porting process for ACES, a client-server Windows application, to OS/400 soon.

When the work is done in porting the Biometric Trust Engine to OS/400 and integrating it with iXchange, Tangent will have what it considers a virtually fraud-proof credit-checking application. "If you have an application pulling credit reports, or you're applying for a mortgage, you don't want just anybody to access your credit history," said Tom Secreto, Tangent's chief information officer and a director in the company, which is traded on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board market.

Tangent last week announced the licensing and its intention to port the software to OS/400. The company's agreement with Security First gives Tangent exclusive rights to market and license the technology to the financial services industry in North America for the next five years. Security First, which, like Tangent, is in a period of restructuring following bankruptcy, spent $65 million to develop the biometric technology, Secreto said. According to the Ethentica Web site, more than 200 man-years were spent developing the company's software.

Tangent's announcement left little doubt that it has high hopes for its activities. "The scope of this license benefits our company immediately," stated Vito Bellezza, Tangent's chief executive, in the press release. "Once we port this software to the IBM iSeries, we expect the floodgates to open and we will be ready."

The Ethentica Biometric Trust Engine is different from other fingerprint-recognition technologies on the market because it doesn't keep an entire copy of a person's fingerprint image on file, Secreto said. Instead, the application digitally splits the fingerprint into sections, encrypts each section, and stores them on different machines, thereby preventing them from being obtained by intruders, or the government, for that matter. This technique should also alleviate the concerns of people who don't want their fingerprints on file for reasons of civil liberty, he said.

The Ethentica Biometric Trust Engine is also different from similar offerings because it won't be running on Windows servers, which, Secreto said, just aren't secure enough to handle such powerful identity-authentication technologies. "OS/400 was born to do this kind of stuff," said Secreto, who has worked with IBM midrange computers since the first version of the S/38 operating system and considers himself an OS/400 bigot. "You know there's nothing else like this on the '400."

Secreto recognized that the software could run in a logical partition on an iSeries dedicated to Linux, but that doesn't bring the same level of security as a pure OS/400 partition, he said. "OS/400 is more secure than Linux," he said. "I'm beyond arguments. We have the Linux version up and running . . . [but] I wouldn't sell it to anybody."

Beyond integration with ACES and iXchange, Tangent will be working to spread the adoption of its OS/400-enabled version of Ethentica Biometric Trust Engine--which it might rename something like "EBS Trust Engine by Security First"--into other areas. Secreto said that the company is working to develop a sales channel, and that it's in talks with two large software vendors in the financial services industry that may be interested in using the software.

Tangent plans to market the Biometric Trust Engine to other independent software vendors and companies in the financial services industry through its subsidiary Engineered Business Systems. The software could also find its way into the public sector through Tangent's other subsidiary, Consumer Guardian.

"That's the final piece in our hub," Secreto said. "We think with that, we have a way to address the identity-theft issue. Nobody has a solution for identity-theft prevention. Lots of people have identity-theft detection, but by then it's too late. The pieces are all there for us to solve this problem."

For biometric authentication technologies like this to really catch on in society, Secreto said, it's going to require people to overcome the perception that these technologies are used to amass FBI-like files on the most personal details of their lives. "It has to be a voluntary thing," he said.

Faced with the options, though, Secreto says level-headed people will opt for the greater security that technologies like these will bring.

"Sept. 11 made people look at security more," Secreto said. "The financial state of the economy has everybody more conscious about fraud and losses. Everybody is security-conscious right now."