Researchers from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers have proposed a distributed mobile biometric authentication system based on a high performance cluster cloud, saying the speed and security it provides will be needed as applications such as banking increasingly go mobile.The team details experiments in a new paper which illustrted that that their cloud-based biometric authentication framework, or BAMCloud, could achieve network speed performance of over eight times more than alternate methods.” High availability, better time efficiency and scalability are some of the added advantages of using the proposed system,” said the team, which included Farhana J. Zareen, Kashish A. Shakil, Member, IEEE, Mansaf Alam, Member, IEEE, as well as Suraiya Jabin and Shabih Shakeel.The BAMCloud framework developed by the IEEE team is divided into several different phases. It begins with data capture conducted on mobile devices and storage of data in the HDFS cloud. The data is then pre-processed and trained in a neural network environment. Finally, the pre-processed data is stored on the HDFS cloud, where it can be queried. Queries, performed by Hive data warehousing software on the HDFS system, provide biometric authentication for users to access their data.The results showed that the algorithm used for data training achieved speeds of seven times the average existing approach, and the algorithm used for processing was 10 times faster. Overall, the dual-algorithm approach of the BAMCloud provided 8.5 times faster results than comparable techniques in use today.BAMCloud, in initial studies, provides a solution for mobile biometric authentication that is scalable, cost efficient, and accurate. Using cloud computing for biometric identity verification not only provides a scalable solution for the enormous amounts of data required, it also offers the opportunity for data to be offloaded to a third-party cloud for storage.