The Election Commission of Pakistan has awarded the agreement for the supply of biometric verification system of voters for national and provincial assemblies of Pakistan to Secure Tech Consultancy (Pvt) Ltd.
The contract requires the delivery of the biometric verification system and 100 devices to be used as a pilot in the next by-elections to validate the accuracy and efficacy of the system. The findings of the pilot would form the basis of the strategy to implement this system in the national and provincial assembly elections.
An international tender was floated last year and after an extensive evaluation process—which involved presentations of the system to the Parliamentary Committee for Electoral reforms—a joint venture, including Secure Tech Consultancy as leader, Dermalog Systems (a German company responsible for the Fingerprint scanners and software) and Telepower (a Chinese company responsible for the device manufacturing) was issued the letter of award on Jan 5, 2017. Secure Tech will install the HSM and the fingerprint scanner in its production facility and develop and deploy all associated software for the system.
Election commission secretary announced the award of a contract to Secure Tech. It is pertinent to mention here that Secure Tech is the largest biometric devices supplier in Pakistan for the telecommunication industry with over 100,000 devices in the field, and has played a vital role in the recent re-verification drive for mobile phone owners.
The devices to be used by the ECP employs state of the art technology using an Octa Core processor with an embedded optical fingerprint scanner which is FBI WSQ and FBI PIV certified. The matching algorithm performing a 1:1 match takes place inside the hardware security module (HSM) which is FIBS-140 level 3 certified. All the fingerprints are encrypted and stored in the HSM ensuring the system to be secure and tamper-proof.