At Identiverse 2025, Aware joined thousands of identity and security leaders in Las Vegas to showcase the latest innovations in biometric technology. From fraud prevention and compliance to user experience and enterprise security, Aware demonstrated how biometric authentication is solving today’s most pressing identity challenges—securely and seamlessly.

As part of the event, Aware CEO Ajay Amlani sat down with Adrian Sanabria of Cyber Risk TV for a live podcast interview from the expo floor. The conversation spanned everything from the origins of biometric standards to the impact of AI on modern identity systems.

Here are the top takeaways from the session:

30 Years of Biometric Expertise

Ajay kicked off the conversation by sharing Aware’s legacy—a company born out of government needs and scientific rigor. Initially tasked by the FBI to create a common digital fingerprint standard, Aware has spent three decades perfecting biometric technologies spanning fingerprint, face, iris, and voice recognition.

“We’ve been the go-to partner for biometric deployments at scale, supporting federal agencies for decades. Now, the commercial world is catching up—and it’s an exciting time.” —Ajay Amlani

Face is the Future: Frictionless and Familiar

While fingerprinting still plays a role—especially in law enforcement—Ajay noted a marked shift toward facial recognition as the biometric modality of choice. Why?

• Touchless and intuitive: No need for additional hardware or contact.
• High user acceptance: Consumers are already used to unlocking phones with their faces.
• Ubiquitous camera quality: Most smartphones now offer sufficient resolution and depth sensing to support advanced biometric matching.

Ajay emphasized that people naturally use face recognition in daily life—whether it’s being greeted with “the usual” at a coffee shop or recognized by a colleague. Technology is simply replicating that interaction, at scale and with security.

Liveness Detection: The Deepfake Antidote

A critical insight from the session was the growing threat of deepfakes and synthetic identities. With generative AI capabilities becoming increasingly accessible, adversaries now have powerful tools to spoof identity systems.

“Attackers are building deepfakes to mimic real people—and they share best practices. To protect systems, we need liveness detection to confirm there’s a real, present human on the other side.” —Ajay Amlani

The Aware investment in passive liveness detection technology—to help ensure the person enrolling is real, live, and not a spoof, without requiring specific movement commands such as blinking or turning one’s head—is central to its approach for both government and enterprise customers.

Rethinking MFA: Biometrics as the Unifying Factor

Historically, multifactor authentication (MFA) involved:

• Something you know (e.g., password)
• Something you have (e.g., a hardware token)
• Something you are (e.g., biometric)

But Ajay made a strong case for authentication today: face biometrics can fulfill multiple factors in a single interaction. Since people inherently carry their face and are their face, one biometric interaction—if verified for liveness—can replace the need for clunky OTPs or hardware tokens.

“We’re entering a phase where we don’t have to choose between convenience and security. With the right biometric stack, we can have both.”

Consumer Devices as Enterprise Gateways

Ajay also challenged the assumption that consumer-grade biometrics are “good enough” for enterprise security. Tools like Face ID and Windows Hello offer convenience, but often lack initial identity verification—leaving systems vulnerable to misattributed access.

Ajay’s key recommendation? Anchor your authentication chain with a trusted biometric enrollment process right out the gate. Without that, even sophisticated face matching can become a weak link.

From Trade Show to Trusted Identity

Identiverse 2025 was a powerful reminder that biometrics isn’t about science fiction anymore—it’s core to how we secure our digital and physical worlds. Ajay and Adrian’s conversation and perspective showed us not just where the technology has been, but where it’s going:

• Frictionless security that users actually like
• Trusted identity in both digital and physical realms
• Proactive defense against deepfakes and spoofing

As identity becomes the new perimeter, biometric solutions like those pioneered by Aware are setting the standard for what it means to truly know who’s online.

Watch the full podcast here for more insights.