UIDAI faces 100 daily cyberattacks, turns to AI and quantum-proofing for Aadhaar

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is battling hundreds of cyberattacks every day, according to its Chairperson Neelkanth Mishra, who also serves as an Executive Director at the World Bank Group. Speaking on the sidelines of the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai, Mishra detailed the continuous technological arms race required to secure the national identity infrastructure.

"We have been dealing with cyber security and cyber threats from the day we started. We face hundreds of attacks from hackers every day. So we have built safeguards against that," Mishra said.

Central to these defences is the deployment of machine learning to detect identity fraud and block unauthorised access. The authority currently runs liveness tests for both facial and fingerprint biometric authentication to filter out fraudsters attempting to spoof the system.

"It's a cat and mouse game," Mishra acknowledged, noting that as artificial intelligence enhances the capabilities of hackers, UIDAI must invest in staying several steps ahead with its own technological upgrades.

Looking to the future, Mishra revealed that UIDAI is beginning work on post-quantum cryptography. This proactive measure is designed to protect the foundational public-key and private-key infrastructure that underpins Aadhaar from being compromised by advanced quantum computing, which could potentially break current encryption standards.

Beyond threat containment, UIDAI is expanding its utility through software development kits (SDKs) that allow external entities to embed face authentication directly into their own applications. Mishra explained that this integration aims to make verification more seamless for residents and broaden the ecosystem of use cases, potentially even enabling Aadhaar usage outside India in the future, a move currently not permitted.