Building government-grade digital identity

As an airline, it’s important for you to know who you’re dealing with and to be sure your passengers have the right to travel. Digital identity is a key way to manage this, and also to ensure you’re meeting governance and compliance goals, while in addition combating fraud.

But digital identity is fluid, and constantly evolving. So how do you know which model to choose? You want to be as sure as possible that the person standing in front of you is the person who they say they are, and that they have the right to travel.

What you’re looking for is government-grade digital identity – but what does that actually mean? It means when a passenger shares a digital identity, you can be as confident as you would be if they presented government-issued ID (like a passport, an official ID card, or a driver’s license).

With a passport, it’s relatively easy for agents to be sure it’s genuine – or at least that the document itself is genuine. Electronic Machine Readable Travel Documents (eMRTDs), such as ePassports and electronic ID cards, can be quickly authenticated via the ICAO Public Key Directory (PKD) central repository. So you can be sure that a given passport, for example, was issued to a given person by an approved authority.

It gets much harder, however, when it comes to a visa, which is usually just a stamp in a passport, or a sticker – or even worse, a printed page. All of which are relatively easy to fake.

A digital visa, or eVisa, makes much more sense, where a request is created, and then sent electronically to the country concerned. That way, the agent checking a passenger’s credentials simply needs to find out whether there is a valid visa for today’s flight for that passenger.

At SITA, we decentralize the process, and take the headaches away. So we manage Digital Travel Credentials (DTCs) for you, and all you have to do is integrate with us. More than 70 governments and all the G20 nations already use SITA’s digital border solutions, representing 85% of international air passengers globally. So we already have the right connections for you.

We build government-grade digital identity, deriving the ID directly from the government-issued document. The digital identity is issued following a self-sovereign identity model, with the data stored on the user’s personal mobile device rather than in a centralized database. Its use is always at the passenger’s consent, and it can be securely deleted at any time. (At SITA we adhere rigidly to privacy-by-default and privacy-by-design concepts throughout our solutions, ensuring that local data privacy regulations are adhered to.)

Passengers can then choose who they want to share their information with – you or airports – and reuse their enrollment for multiple journeys across multiple airports. This gives them a better customer experience, as they are biometrically verified as they travel through the airport, right through to boarding the plane.

From your perspective as an airline, government-grade digital identity is easily integrated into your existing processes, and delivers a whole raft of benefits. It provides a far better level of security and control than manual checks and paper-based documents, and you no longer have to hold unnecessary personal information on your servers. Possibilities for fraudulent activity are reduced too, with DTCs being both trusted and verifiable.

Today, we are using ICAO Type 1 DTCs, which are self-derived. These are generated by passport holders, and stored by them on their mobile devices. The passport is still required, for verification. The next level will be Type 2 DTCs, which are authority-derived, and generated by the government authority, directly. So the physical passport will only be needed as a reference document. Governments are expected to start issuing Type 2 DTCs within the next five years.

We enable the production and management of digital identity through a number of different offerings. We maintain and provide identity framework libraries which can be embedded into airlines’ mobile apps. These are used for the authentication of ePassports and visa verification, and for biometric capture and liveness detection.

We also offer our own ICAO DTC derivation service. This authenticates the contents of ICAO 9303 ePassports and derives ICAO-compliant DTCs, as verifiable credentials.

Our Mobile Wallet software development kit (SDK) secures the storage and management of verifiable credentials, and is easily embedded into your mobile app. This can be used in conjunction with SITA Smart Path, the world’s only proven fully end-to-end biometric passenger processing solution. Passengers can be enrolled in seconds into the Smart Path biometric airport experience, combining a verified DTC with their face image and boarding pass.

Another complementary service is our airline issuer / verifier agent application which issues airline IDs and boarding passes. It verifies DTCs and eVisas for passenger check-in, and can be hosted by us, or by you on-premise. The application is seamlessly integrated with your airline check-in system and mobile app back-ends.

All of this is part of the SITA Digital Travel Ecosystem, which ensures shared trust across all airport ecosystem participants. Underpinned, of course, by the government-grade digital identities we build.