No more switching apps for Aadhaar face authentication as UIDAI launches new tool

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on Wednesday launched an Aadhaar Face Authentication SDK and a sandbox to help banks, fintech firms and other entities integrate the biometric authentication facility directly into their mobile applications.

The new software development kit allows UIDAI's Face Authentication capability to be embedded directly into native Android and iOS applications, removing the need for users to switch between their primary banking or fintech app and a separate application for face authentication.

Earlier, users seeking to complete Aadhaar Face Authentication through an app typically needed the Aadhaar FaceRD application to be installed on their device.

The new SDK is designed to allow the entire authentication journey to take place within the organisation's own app.

The ready-to-use SDK incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning-based liveness and anti-spoofing capabilities. UIDAI said it is designed to work across consumer smartphones.

UIDAI also launched a Face Authentication Sandbox, providing organisations with a controlled environment to integrate, test and validate the authentication journey before moving to production.

Developers and quality assurance teams can use the sandbox to test user provisioning and consent, face capture, liveness checks, authentication, error handling and response validation.

It also allows testing of failure scenarios, including invalid digital signatures, network interruptions, timeouts and spoofing attempts, without requiring external biometric hardware.

“The launch of the SDK and Sandbox fulfills a long-standing demand of the Fintech and banking ecosystem to build a seamless, and secure user onboarding journey from within the user bank/fintech organisation’s mobile application,” Ministry of Electronics & IT said in a statement.

Government departments, banks, fintechs and other organisations are expected to benefit from easier deployment of Face Authentication-enabled services.

Speaking at the fintech fest, UIDAI Chairman Neelkanth Mishra said the authority was using AI extensively to detect and counter fraud.

"Fraudsters keep getting smarter but we are also getting smarter," Mishra said, describing the fight against fraud as a "cat and mouse" game.

He said UIDAI had been using liveness tests for face and fingerprint authentication well before AI became a buzzword, and that the authority was continuing to strengthen its systems as fraud techniques evolve.

Mishra said Aadhaar authentications had increased from around seven crore a day when he first wrote comments for UIDAI's annual report to about 10 crore currently.

"We are doing 10 crore authentications a day," he said, adding that UIDAI was preparing its infrastructure to handle 25-30 crore authentications a day as usage expands.

Mishra said more than 600 entities now use Aadhaar, as people increasingly need to establish their identity online for services ranging from banking to telecom.

He said agentic use cases could grow substantially over the next three years, with people potentially delegating authentication-related tasks to AI agents and creating applications that are difficult to envisage today.

"Agentic use cases will pick up a lot. So instead of humans trying to authenticate, they may delegate to agents and we may find use cases that may be hard to imagine right now," he said.