A Framework for Nation-Wide Integration of Biometric Information
Thesis
Having a central database for Nigeria which organizations can rely on for identification/verification purposes has been a plan in the pipeline for many years now. This has become urgent because of the nation’s current security challenges and the problem of multiple enrolments across various organizations. All of these organizations collect data, but the data collected is not useful outside the collecting organizations. According to various reports, the Nigerian government has been trying to create a central database to contain Nigerian nationals’ basic information and biometric information as well, to be managed by the Nigerian Identity Management Commission (NIMC), but to no avail. The project ‘National Identity Database’ creation was started in 2007 and to date has not yet been successful. This thesis aims to create a central platform for integration of all of these biometric data in order to curb these problems while considering security of access control. In this work, we have created four different web applications and databases, to represent information of four different organizations; Nigerian Immigration System, Independent National Electoral Commission, Bank, NIMC, with NIMC serving as the central point. The data represented includes basic information and biometric information (fingerprints) of their enrolees. The web applications where designed using C#.net on visual studio IDE alongside other supporting software like MySQL connector, Adobe Fireworks and database access with PhpMyAdmin. Each application includes four modules, enrolment, admin, query and verification module. The verification module serves as the platform where different organizations’ applications can interface to the central database, giving the opportunity to identify individuals from any point. The overall system developed provides a platform for this, in order to curb multiple and indiscriminate collection of biometric (fingerprint) data which is a major challenge in the country at present.