The South Korean military’s Military Manpower Administration has partnered with Raonsecure, one of S. Korea’s leading ICT security software companies, to provide a blockchain-based biometric ID and authentication solution for the S. Korean Military.
South Korean Army Goes Digital
The South Korean Military’s Military Manpower Administration has announced that they will be adopting a new biometric ID and authentication solution designed by Raonsecure, one of the leading cybersecurity firms in South Korea. Raonsecure is also the team behind TouchEn. TouchEn OnePass is the most popular FIDO (Fast Identity Online) biometric authentication service in Korea, and is also the first FIDO-certified authentication system currently being used by financial institutions.
Raonsecure’s blockchain ID solution is being jointly-developed with the Loop, the organization behind the Icon (ICX) blockchain network. The blockchain-based authentication system will be designed with FIDO standards designed into the system itself. FIDO-certified authentication solutions use unique biometric markers like voice recognition, facial recognition, fingerprints, iris recognition, along with present solutions like an old fashioned pin number, to address a wide variety of use cases.
Biometric Authentication is a massive emerging market
Raonsecure currently serves 30 million people in S. Korea with TouchEn biometric mobile payments, and they project this to grow to 700 million users in the Asian-Pacific region. Raonsecure’s TouchEn authentication solution takes a page from blockchain by employing public key cryptography, familiar to many cryptocurrency users as the mechanism which generates wallet recovery seeds and wallet addresses.
Biometric systems promise amazing convenience and much less friction for consumers with much better security than the present password-based systems currently in use.
Inadequate password entropy is the root cause of 80% of data breaches, and when you add that to the fact that the typical internet user has over 90 password-based accounts we can see a huge potential risk for breaches. FIDO biometric systems dramatically reduce this risk and make the online checkout process much smoother, while reducing fraud.
For military applications, things like 2 factor-authentication, passwordless verification, and multifactor authentication could be employed to access sensitive systems, restricted locations, and top-secret data, etc.
Not the first time a Military has used Blockchain
South Korea’s interest in using blockchain for military applications comes not long after China’s announcement that soldiers could be rewarded in crypto for exemplary performance and party loyalty, last November. The news broke just after China’s President, Xi Jinping, shocked the crypto community with his new love for blockchain technology.
The US military also expressed similar interests in leveraging blockchain technology for military use last year. In a press release back in August, a San Fransisco-based blockchain technology company announced it had signed a contract with the United States airforce to create an interoperable data system. Utilizing blockchain’s immutability, Constellation Network, touted it could “help securely unlock traditionally siloed and non-accessible data and data sources”. The company’s VP, Benjamin Diggles, continued,
…the USAF has a multitude of data sources like drones, planes, and satellites that need to be secured. Clean and consolidated data that can be queried instantly is a big need within the defense apparatus.
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