UBITECH participates at the kick-off meeting hosted by INOV (January 10, 2024) in Lisbon, Portugal of the SafeTravellers Innovation Action, officially started on January 1st, 2024. The project is funded by the European Commission (Grant Agreement No. 101121269) and spans on the period January 2024 – December 2026. SafeTravellers aims at a) strengthening the security at the borders, b) improving the productivity of the Border Authorities and LEAs by providing them with the appropriate tools to combat identity fraud at the hardware, identity and travel document, and biometrics level, while c) offering a frictionless border crossing experience for EU/TCN citizens as they will not have to stop at the border checkpoints.
SafeTravellers is both proposing a new way of citizen identification based on multiple biometrics instead of the problematic identity document, as well as an enhancement of the current way of identity verification at the borders through a set of tools that will detect attacks at the biometric hardware, identity and travel document fraud and attempts to falsify biometrics. The proposed solution is GDPR compliant and introduces various privacy preserving mechanisms to safeguard the citizens’ rights. Through the distributed European Multi-Biometric Data Space offered by SafeTravellers, each Member State will keep in its jurisdiction the personal data of its country nationals while allowing cross-border identity checks without transferring or revealing any biometric data.
In SafeTravellers, UBITECH drives the implementation of an accountable and robust identity management system and onboarding mechanism based on Self-Sovereign identity, incorporating robust, secure, legally sound and privacy-friendly processes for the issuance and presentation/verification of EAA credentials – e.g., the SSI passport. Moreover, UBITECH delivers a novel mechanism for threat intelligence to identify unusual events and patterns and derive intelligence and insights regarding ways criminals perform identity and document fraud, providing analytics mainly at Deep-Web and insightful information for risk management and early warning alerts. Last but not least, UBITECH designs and develops novel remote, runtime attestation services, targeting both the software and hardware layers and covering all phases of a biometric device’s execution, for offering enhanced protection against interception, disclosure and TOCTOU attacks.
