Problem Definition

Objective

Today a person can be identified using a variety of unique user identification numbers or user names. A Driver’s Licence number, Social Security Number (SSN), Aadhar Card, PAN, Email ID, and Social Networking Website ID can all be used to uniquely identify an individual. Most of the said IDs are autonomous in nature and the agencies that handle them usually do not share information. As result each time a person applies for a Driver’s Licence or Aadhar Card, he or she has to fill the same personal information over and over again resulting in redundancy of data. There is a paucity of widely accepted solutions that can both be used to authenticate an individual’s identity using the information collected by the agency in charge of issuing the unique ids. We propose a Unique ID Management and Authentication System (UIDMAS) that assigns a unique thirteen digit number to each user. During the registration phase, the personal information and biometric details of a new user is collected. A user’s information is added to central database after approval of a moderator. This information can be shared with other agencies. The nominal roll and biometric information of a user stored in the central database can be used to authenticate a user. External agencies can use APIs to authenticate a person by matching the information, including biometric profile provided to them with the information available with UIDMAS. Currently websites such as Google and Facebook rely on mobile phone numbers and e mail to determine if an account is genuine or fake. The UIDMAS API can be used by such websites to validate the authenticity of an account.

Scope

The UIDMS has four basic users are Administrators, Moderators, Users and API Clients.

1. Administrators An Administrator is responsible for monitoring the working/functioning of moderators, and can modify any user’s profile except his/her own details. The administrator can modify the entire coding and structure of the system. Administrators can also search employee details and user’s details. Administrators can also view statistics related to UIDMAS
2. Moderator Moderators are responsible for approving new users, who register for a unique id. Moderators also are in-charge of approving changes that user’s request by filling up the users update form.
3. User Every user has to apply for unique in presence of moderators, and hence transparency is achieved. The details of every user (citizens) can be maintained easily and projects like family welfare, literacy rate will be benefited. Every user is given an account, which he can use to pay bills, download WAI card among others. The unique id can be used to uniquely identify the user.
4. API Clients WAI provides API that can be used by third party agencies such as Passport Seva Kendra, Police and other government organisations. It can also be used by external websites to enable users to use their WAI ids as Open IDs for logging in and authentication. API to verify the authenticity of WAI cards are also provided. APIs provide three kinds of authentication methods, i.e. the traditional UID and password combination, biometrics and WAI card based authentication.

Software Interface

• Server-Side
• Operating System: Windows 7 or higher
• Web Server: Apache Tomcat 7 or higher
• Database Server: IBM DB2 Express-C 9.7 or higher
• Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.6 or higher, Python 2.7
• Client Side
• Operating System: Any OS with browser support such as Windows 7, Ubuntu 12.04, Fedora 16 among others
• Web browser: Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox, WebKit2 or higher
• Java Runtime Environment 6 or higher
• Development Environment
• Eclipse Indigo IDE with Pydev and Android SDK plugins
• Adobe Dreamweaver
• Android Development Kit
• Firefox with firebug plugin

Functional Requirements

• Registration forms: User friendly forms for new users to register for UID. A user’s personal and biometric information must be collect.
• Local language support.
• User profile pages: Users are provided accounts, to which they can login by providing UID and password. Users should be able to download WAI card, pay bills, upload new photo among others
• Administrator Module: Administrators and moderators should be able to login into their accounts and perform their duties.
• SMS Gateway to send SMS to users.
• Search: Administrators and moderators must be able to search for users by entering key words such as name or any other personal information. User’s information should be stored in a reverse index for this purpose.
• Use of graphical tools to show strategic data to admin
• e-UID Card: e-Card that can be downloaded in pdf format with tamper proof QR Code, that can be authenticated using an API.
• API that can be used by external agencies for user authentication.

Non Functional Requirements

• Secure access of confidential data.
• 24 X 7 availability
• Better component design to get better performance at peak time
• Flexible service based architecture will be highly desirable for future extension

Assumptions

• Thirteen digit identification number minus all combinations of easy to remember numbers is sufficient to represent all current and future users of the system.
• It has been assumed that the WAI server will be available 24x7 and can scaled to meet increase in load.
• WAI requires external services as Google transliterate, Yahoo! Mail, SMS among others. It has been assumed that these services or similar services will always be available.
• Some of the features offered by WAI requires sanction from governments. It has been assumed that that the requisite permissions have been obtained.

Constraints

• The users should have basic knowledge of Computers.
• Biometrics is not entirely fool proof. There are several flaws in biometric systems that need to be addressed.
• In order to ensure that there are no duplicate accounts in the WAI database, the biometric details of a new users has to be matched with all the present users. However this requires huge computation power of a large number of powerful machines working in parallel.
• Local language support and translation of data in to local languages is dependent on third party software/services. Hence the number of languages offered is limited.