Smart Trust: Secure Mobile ID for Trusted Smart Borders

Project Information

Smart-Trust

Grant agreement ID: 778571

DOI

10.3030/778571

Project closed

EC signature date 14 December 2017

Start date 1 January 2018

End date 31 March 2020

Funded under

• Secure societies - Protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens

Total cost

€ 2 991 000,00

EU contribution

€ 2 093 700,00

Coordinated by

VISION BOX - SOLUCOES DE VISAO PORCOMPUTADOR SA
Portugal

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Smart-Trust (Smart Trust: Secure Mobile ID for Trusted Smart Borders)

Reporting period: 2019-01-01 to 2020-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Many facets of life often present us with a need to compromise functionality for security. Air travel is no exception, and even more so in the last decade with multiple terrorist attacks in European airports and the migrant crisis, Europe and the world have lived a non-optimal compromise between security and functionality.

Border checks have become very time-consuming and constraining, especially for travelers crossing EU borders on a regular basis. For airports, airlines and governments it is all about increasing throughput and passenger experience while improving both passenger experience and security. The challenge here is essentially to fight terrorism, crime and illegal trafficking, by strengthening security through border management and risk management, and improving cyber-security of identity mechanisms, while ensuring privacy and freedom of citizens as well as standardization and interoperability of security systems across Europe. Smart-Trust is a new form of identity verification which addresses the following challenges:

1. Security – How can we improve the overall security of citizens through enhanced forms of identity?
2. Seamlessness – How can we make identity verification of passengers and citizens seamless?
3. Security and Seamlessness – How can we reconcile security and user experience and improve both at the same time?
4. Risk Management – How can we improve the current risk management platforms?
5. Privacy – How can we ensure the privacy of citizens while managing such risks?
6. Low-Cost – How can governments have access to cheaper and more secure forms of identity?
7. Interoperability – How can we create a solution which overcomes all the above challenges and still be fully interoperable with existing systems on the market?

The overall objectives are:

1. To research, design and develop fundamental algorithms and protocols to securely virtualize ID documents, model trust in sequences of ID transactions, business rule workflow management and risk assessment, all ready to be integrated into the Smart-Trust platform.
2. To boost security and seamlessness at selected pilot airports/borders and to improve airport, airlines and border police business performance by introducing new services, improving performance, reducing costs, and growing their business, as measured by well-defined KPIs, in a refactorable fashion that is easily reusable by similar stakeholders.
3. To develop a multi-faceted, effective dissemination of Smart-Trust results to the research and industrial community and to pave the way to effective IPR management and market exploitation through appropriate business models and an open community approach.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

1. Research and Development

During the 27 months of Smart-Trust project has developed an agile, modular, and highly configurable open architecture platform with the following robust, versatile, and scalable core components:
• Mobile ID services and app: mobile identity enrolment and verification services.
• TrustChain: a blockchain-based infrastructure to assert citizen transactions in a distributed and self-regulatory fashion.
• Workflow Orchestration: a management component catering to stakeholder-driven business rules.
• Analytics and risk-assessment algorithms: deliver professional customized monitoring dashboards as well as detecting passenger trends and anomalies in real-time.
These components were developed to be compatible with other established Vision-Box services including Automated Border Control, Advance Passenger Information Systems (APIS) and the forthcoming Schengen Area required Entry-Exit System (EES).

2. Pilots

In the first year, the mobile ID concept has been tested in (1) internal pilots with hundreds of people, yielding thousands of individual tests, and the seamless flow concept (excluding border) has been tested in pilots in one major international airport. The objectives of the test pilot were:
• To show the level of performance attainable by the Smart Trust biometric system.
• To determine satisfactory performance through testing.
• To demonstrate the feasibility of Mobile ID, encourage more testing to be sponsored, and to promote methodologies contributing to the improvement of biometric identification and seamless clearance.
The integrated pilot happened in the second year of the project, in the departures of terminal 1 of Lisbon Airport, where we invited real passengers to participate in the pilot explaining the smart trust objectives and during the enrolment process, and after their passage in eGates using our mobile ID, they were invited to answer a short questionnaire about the usability of the technology, crucial to identify usability problems, collect qualitative and quantitative data regarding the experience and determine the participant's satisfaction with the pilot and the demonstrated technology.
Face recognition was used as a test in a scenario for positive identification in a normal airport environment, with cooperative non-habituated users. The evaluation was conducted in accordance with the “Best Practices in Testing and Reporting Performance of Biometric Devices” and performed 6,275 transactions over a 40 days period. The pilot results take into account:
• Failure to Enrol and Failure to Acquire Rates.
• Trade-off between matching errors and between decision errors over a range of decision criteria.
• Throughput rates of users in the live application and of the matching algorithm in offline processing.

3. Dissemination and Exploitation

The project team has created impressive awareness through over 21 conferences and industrial events and has created a project website and engaging social network pages. A Marketing Plan was produced detailing the go-to-market strategy, business models and pricing approach.
Smart-Trust Project was designed as technology vector for mobile identification. After assessing the business cases of the various stakeholders, Vision-Box established requirements and defined KPI’s sought by the airports, airlines, government, and border officials. The pilot provided new insight into several factors that affect the performance of established biometric technology using mobile devices and the reaction by travelers to the technology.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Smart-Trust is engineered to increase the reliability and trust levels of identity verification at European borders, and increase the border security of member states. It introduces Mobile ID as a new technology enabler to leverage digital identity and biometric identification to provide a self-service seamless clearance process. Smart Trust employs biometrics on-the-move technology for a non-stop identification process by relying on digital identity electronic documents stored in individual mobile devices and ensuring personally identifiable information is secure with Privacy by Design™ protocol engineering.
Where mobile technology has transformed the way people now communicate, Smart Trust goes one step further and transforms the way people identify themselves. Smart Trust creates an ecosystem that enables a hands-free digital ID authentication process using mobile devices to give individuals, businesses, and governments a complete paperless and contactless identification clearance option. Additionally, Smart Trust ensures individual privacy and the safeguarding of personally identifying information through Privacy by Design™ (PbD) engineering.

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