Digital identity models: What’s next for secure and seamless travel?

Several countries are beginning to accept digital travel credentials in place of physical passports, as predicted by Accenture’s Tech Vision 2023. Indeed, global events, including the COVID-19 pandemic, irregular migration crisisand climate change, are raising the need for innovative digital solutions to facilitate a more efficient, touchless, safe, and secure travel experience.

With limited time, space and resources, the travel industry needs to find new ways to adopt risk-based assessment of travellers and move away from manually checking every individual. Most travellers are compliant and low risk. With that in mind, the industry should be able to focus resources on detection of risks and threats.

A risk-based approach, powered by sophisticated AI, will require trusted, high-quality, and verifiable data across the entire traveller experience. This cannot be achieved in a system that involves manual checks of paper-based credentials. Credentialing the entire traveller experience will give individuals a simpler, safer, and improved travel experience, and keep borders more secure and protected.

The COVID-19 pandemic has also accelerated the adoption of digital credentials and identity wallets that enable travellers to use mobile devices for identification, authentication, authorization throughout their travels. According to an IATA Global Passenger Survey, 83% of travellers would share their immigration information to speed up the airport arrival process and 93% are interested in a programme for trusted travellers to expedite security screening. The need for digital credentials to facilitate travel is clear.

Despite multiple solutions emerging to address the challenges of sharing and verifying travel documents and credentials, the vision of a globally interoperable, trusted, and widely adopted identity framework is far from complete. So far, increased digitization of travel credentials hasn’t necessarily created a more efficient/agreeable travel journey. For instance:

However, over recent years, standards-based solutions for identity verification and digital credentials have advanced significantly. We outline three identity models that, we argue, will play a fundamental role in the future of secure and seamless travel.

Currently, all the key emerging identity models have some important limitations. DTC, for example, is designed for a very specific use case (cross-border travel) and it does not yet support privacy preserving techniques such as selective disclosure, nor does it support more than one issuer. The current mDL specification is designed to support only in-person use cases, where the verifier uses a physical reader to verify the mDL. Like the ICAO model, the mDL specification presumes a single issuing authority. Decentralized Identity, while allowing for cross-border and cross-sector scalability, is dependent on robust trust frameworks and governance. Such frameworks and governance require multi-stakeholder collaboration and may take a long time to establish for cross-border travel.

Depending on the travel use case and business requirements, some identity models will be more suitable than others – and that’s okay. It’s unlikely the whole world will ever agree on a single digital identity construct to facilitate every traveller’s interaction, even if there is broad consensus around the key design elements. Therefore, we should focus on alignment around a common vision, collaborating across geographies and use cases, and interoperability between the different specifications and exchange protocols.

Solutions will need to emerge that can support a mix of digital identity credentials, for exchange both in-person and across the internet, that can be under the control of the traveller and managed from their private and secure digital identity wallet. Such multi-purpose wallets would reduce complexity for travellers, giving them a “one stop shop” for their trusted identity information.

Standardized digital credentials can facilitate different interactions for domestic and international travel, starting with sharing one or more verifiable proofs with a government to streamline visa application and ending with a hotel check-in. Travellers would no longer need to share the same information repeatedly, manually populating different forms. The type of credential used for each interaction will reflect a combination of stakeholder requirements and user preferences. Certain transactions will require only a single verifiable proof – containing no personal information (proving that the subject is over 21, for example), whereas others may require a combination of verifiable proofs derived from one or more issuers to satisfy requirements (proving that the subject has a valid visa, return flight, and passport). In these cases, digital credentials with flexibility and applicability to different countries, sectors and use cases will be most useful for travellers.

Only with mass adoption can the benefits be fully realized. How do we get there? Adoption will depend on:

The question is not whether digital travel credentials are to be used, but how. Because there is demand from the traveller, the authorities, and the private sector to adopt digital travel credentials. However, the identity landscape is still confusing, requiring travellers to keep track of their various credentials and where and when they can be used. The future of secure and seamless travel needs user-centric solutions, enabling the use of trusted, secure, interoperable digital credentials that can be used across borders and sectors.

Note: A verifiable credential is a tamper-evident credential that has authorship that can be cryptographically verified. Verifiable credentials can be used to build verifiable presentations, which can also be cryptographically verified. The claims in a credential can be about different subjects.