Building an Open Identity Platform for India

Summary form only given. Aadhaar, India's Unique Identity Project, has become the largest biometric identity system in the world, already covering more than 920 million people. Building such a massive system required significant design thinking, aligning to the core strategy, and building a technology platform that is scalable to meet the project's objective. Entire technology architecture behind Aadhaar is based on principles of openness, linear scalability, strong security, and most importantly vendor neutrality. All application components are built using open source components and open standards. Aadhaar system currently runs across two of the data centers within India managed by UIDAI and handles 1 million enrollments a day and at the peak doing about 900 trillion biometric matches a day. Current system has about 8 PB (8000 Terabytes) of raw data. Aadhaar Authentication service, which requires sub-second response time, is already live and can handle more than 100 million authentications a day. In this talk, the speaker, who has been the Chief Architect of Aadhaar since inception, shares his experience of building the system.