Second Public Testing Round Announced

June 20, 2008: After expressions of interest from industry, NIST will open a new round of match-on-card testing on September 30, 2008. The test will address the same ISO/IEC 17974-2 accuracy and timing measurements as in Phase II, and will use the same evaluation protocol i.e. NIST Interagency Report 7485. The intent is to track progress and to broaden participation. The result will be published as a revision of NIST Interagency Report 7477.

NIST is happy to discuss any proposals to extend the scope.

Participants must supply SDK and cards to NIST between September 15 and September 30, 2008 per the instructions in 7485. In the meantime, Requests, comments, and questions should be addressed to minexII@nist.gov.

MOC Standardization Project Approved

June 10, 2008: The national bodies of ISO/IEC JTC 1 Subcommitte 37, Biometrics, have voted to initiate standardization of a match-on-card test protocol as ISO/IEC 19795 Biometric Performance Testing and Reporting - Part 7: Testing of ISO/IEC 7816-based verification algorithms. The U.S. national body has contributed the core of NIST Interagency Report 7485 toward a base working draft of the standard.

Formal Release of Test Plan

February 29, 2008: The MINEX II test plan and concept of operations, finalized August 2007, has been formally released as NIST Interagency Report 7485.

Test Report

February 7, 2007: The results of the MINEX II evaluation are now available as NIST Interagency Report 7477.

Final Test Plan

October 19, 2007: The final Phase II test plan has been modified to include the latest schedule information and to modify the participation agreement to indicate Phase II (not Phase I).

Validation Data and Procedures

October 25, 2007: A page dedicated to SDK validation procedures has been established.

Conference Presentation

October 23, 2007: NIST staff presented the MINEX II program at the Biometrics 2007 Conference in London.

Final Test Plan

October 19, 2007: The final Phase II test plan is now available. There are no material changes to the August 15 document. October 23, 2007: Fixed statement to do with number of minutia before command chaining is needed.

Contact Information

October 8, 2007: All inquiries should be directed to minexII@nist.gov.

Test Plan

October 8, 2007: A final draft of the Phase II test plan will be posted here by October 15, 2007. This will be almost identical to the Phase I MOC evaluation plan but will clarify some small technical inconsistencies found in Phase I, and modified logistical information.

Submission Period

October 8, 2007: The window for participation in Phase II of MINEX II opens on October 22, and closes at 23:00 GMT on November 5 (five), 2007. It is critical that participants submit early because NIST expects to iteratively interract with the vendor to validate correct operation of the card and software - such a process might include second and third submissions of replacement cards or PC-based SDKs.

NIST will not test inoperable submissions: Cards and software that remain non-conformant to the test specification at 23:00 GMT on November 15 (fifteen), 2007 will not be debugged, validated, tested or further considered. These deadlines are instituted to establish a fair and effective test process.

NIST intends to publish the results of the Phase II evaluation in December 2007.

Results of Evaluation

October 8, 2007: Per the participation agreement, NIST will provide results to Phase I participants imminently. Results will only be published to a general audience at the conclusion of the Phase II trial (above).

Submission Period

Sep 10, 2007: NIST accepted submissions for MINEX II Phase I during the period from July 11, 2007 until 23:00 GMT September 10, 2007.

Phase I Participation

Aug 15, 2007: Prospective participants must follow instructions in the final MOC evaluation plan. This includes completion of the participation agreement in Annex H.

Final Evaluation Plan

July 11, 2007: A final MOC evaluation plan is available. NIST now welcomes submissions per Annex H. The final plan is the result of development phase in which series of drafts [8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1] were circulated for comment.

Purpose

MINEX II is the part of the MINEX program dedicated to the evaluation and development of the capabilities of fingerprint minutia matchers running on ISO/IEC 7816 smart cards. MINEX itself is series of NIST coordinated development efforts aimed at improving the performance and interoperability of core implementations of the INCITS 378 and ISO/IEC 19794-2 fingerprint minutia standards.

Relation of MINEX II to Secure Biometric Match-on-Card

MINEX II is being conducted concurrently with a separate NIST activity, SBMOC which is designed to assess feasibility of conducting crytographically secure contactless biometric authentication in less than 2.5s. Participation in SBMOC is not required for MINEX II.