Z-TAS

BSc (Hons) Computer Science | Software Development Group Project

Nidula Weerasinghe

Wasathsen Oshadha Bhanu Kodagoda Gamage

Alisha Mohamed

Zero Touch Authentication System (Z-TAS) is a high-assurance, multimodal biometric access control system using simultaneous, contactless palm vein and palmprint recognition, two physiological traits that are inherently internal, difficult to spoof, and unique to each individual. At the hardware layer, a Raspberry Pi with a modified camera module (IR-cut filter removed, linear polarizing films applied) captures near-infrared biometric images with minimal ambient interference. A dedicated C++ gRPC service on the device handles real-time image acquisition. Captured frames pass through an OpenCV and GStreamer pipeline, where a C++ fusion engine performs preprocessing, ROI extraction, and feature fusion to generate a biometric template. Templates transfer to a Rust-based gRPC server isolated within Kata Containers for hardware-level sandboxing, managing matching, AES-GCM-256 authenticated encryption/decryption with AAD, and PostgreSQL storage. A Go-based gRPC server on a VPS bridges REST API calls to the internal high-performance gRPC service mesh, while a central Go orchestrator coordinates the workflow. The user ecosystem features a web admin dashboard and a 2FA mobile application, both serviced by a low-latency RESTful API gateway. The administrative panel provides centralized edge-node management and cryptographic key orchestration. To eliminate credential vulnerabilities, both interfaces enforce passwordless authentication utilizing Passkeys. High-frequency session tracking and transient 2FA states are offloaded to an in-memory Redis data store, ensuring sub-millisecond response times without impacting the relational database. Z-TAS is designed for deployment in any environment demanding contactless, tamper-resistant, high-security physical or logical access control.