The Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM) provides biometric match, store, share, and analyze services to DHS and mission partners. The need for biometrics continues to grow among DHS Components; interagency stakeholders (e.g., the Departments of State, Justice, and Defense); state, local, tribal and territorial entities; the Intelligence Community; and international mission partners. Biometrics support critical national security priorities, including counterterrorism and immigration. OBIM is focused on delivering accurate, timely, and high assurance biometric identity information and analysis. OBIM’s overall goals and priorities include continuing to improve biometric services and access to expanded biometric data to enable DHS operational missions. Learn more about OBIM's history, accomplishments, and impact on the DHS mission over the past decade.
OBIM provides the Department of Homeland Security and its mission partners with biometric identity services that enable national security and public safety decision making.
OBIM leads the use of biometric identity for a safer world, enhanced individual privacy, and improved quality of life.
OBIM's services include: fingerprint, face recognition, and iris modalities (both one-to-one and one-to-many); automated match-store-share capabilities; human biometric examiners; and notification services that alert subscribers to encounters, changes in derogatory information, or other activities on individual identities.
The Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT) is the primary DHS biometric repository, and the largest biometric repository in the U.S. Government. IDENT enables DHS operators and mission partners to more effectively and readily benefit from one another's biometric data, and is efficient for DHS, avoiding the need for duplicate systems.
OBIM's subject matter experts support DHS Components and mission partners in daily operations, developing and fielding new capabilities, and providing thought leadership on future biometric technologies.
As a steward, OBIM does not own the biometric data that DHS Components and mission partners collect. OBIM's role is to manage and protect this data on behalf of its partners in accordance with legal, policy, and privacy requirements. Under OBIM's robust approach to cybersecurity and privacy, each data provider is able to restrict the maintenance, retention, and sharing of its data with other organizations. OBIM provides a conduit to interagency, international, state, and local mission partners. OBIM is the fingerprint provider for the Department of State's Bureau of Consular Affairs. OBIM provides support and biometric guidance, serving as the Secretariat for the Biometric Capabilities Executive Stakeholder Committee led by the Deputy Under Secretary for Management and leading biometric standards work. OBIM is also developing guidance on biometric capture quality, and guidance for DHS Components to collect three modalities — fingerprint, face, and iris — at first encounter, for improved identity assurance.
The breadth and depth of OBIM's customer base began with a simple biometric identification service and has expanded to support complex data sharing programs that assist federal, state, and local agencies by providing a large pool of matching partners for biometric queries and interoperability with other biometric repositories, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Next Generation Identification system. A key strength of OBIM's services is that biometric matching is not limited to a single DHS Component or external mission partner but encompasses encounters across stakeholders. A single query of OBIM's biometric system can retrieve data for an individual tied to a Department of State visa application, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection log of an entry into the United States, and an immigration status change logged by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Protecting the country from transnational threats requires a strengthened homeland security enterprise that shares information across traditional organizational boundaries. Through close federal and international partnerships, DHS works to ensure that resources and information are available to international partners, giving those on the frontlines the tools they need to protect local communities. The Department's efforts include its work through the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the sharing of biometrics through IDENT with international partners seeking information on the subjects of wants, warrants, or lookouts, or any other subject of interest for administering or enforcing the law, national security, immigration, or intelligence, or carrying out DHS mission-related functions.
The SRTP is an international information sharing architecture that is scalable to any country. The SRTP pathway provides decision makers with data to assist in the adjudication of immigration benefits, enforcement actions, credentialing, and country access permissions. SRTP currently supports business use cases for refugee claimants, entry clearance (visas), foreign criminals, redocumentation, and fugitives. SRTP enables international partners to transmit and receive queries from IDENT via encrypted internet messages through the DHS gateway. The information exchanged through this automated process includes biometrics and unique person identifiers, photo(s) and biographic information, and fingerprint identification numbers.