Acronym: SafeTravellers
Title: Secure and Frictionless Identity for EU and Third Country National Citizens.
Topic: HORIZON-CL3-2022-BM-01-02 - Enhanced security of, and combating the frauds on, identity management and identity and travel documents
EU nr: 101121269
Period: 36 months started 1/1/2024-31/12/2026
Total budget: €6,081,079.21
VUB budget: €217,937.50
Contact: prof. dr. Vagelis Papakonstantinou
https://brussels-school.be/team/papakonstantinou-vagelis
At ERIS we had a chance to talk to Vagelis and ask him the question:
What is “SafeTravellers” about?
Vagelis, can you elaborate a little bit more on the context and what will be the VUB expertise in this project?
‘Document fraud is often an essential element of other criminal activities, such as the smuggling of drugs, firearms, stolen vehicles, trafficking of human beings and migrant smuggling. Fraudulent documents have also been used by people involved in terrorist attacks in Europe with most of these cases taking place at the airports.
Last year, the largest number of travellers with fraudulent documents came from Turkish and Senegalese international airports. At the EU’s land border, most fraudulent documents are reported at the Polish-Ukrainian land border. According to Interpol, criminals and terrorists are leveraging both genuine and fraudulent identity and travel documents when they are crossing borders to perform illegal activities. Yet, in some legit cases citizens could have multiple nationalities and thus multiple identity documents even though it is the same person. All the above indicate that the current way of identity verification based on identity documents is at its core, problematic.
Reducing manual labour of identity checks at crossings will allow for processing traveller queues more rapidly. To make the pre-border registration checks efficient, passengers should register their biometrics before travelling -ideally from the comfort of their own homes. Such solutions would be essential for Visa Holders who require face and fingerprint enrolment/verification before entering EU countries. With SafeTravellers, the consortium aims to look into the imperative need to provide trustworthy technologies to combat the security concerns related to identity management, the identity and travel documents, and the biometric identity verification.
Important in this program is that 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. Our research group will be involved in topics with an emphasis on: law, ethics, data management and more specifically ‘data security’.
The project foresees four pilots in different operational environments (land, sea, air) covering border areas related to all transport modes both stationary (i.e., airports, seaport, railway station, land border) and moving (i.e. trains and buses), considering the ‘European multi-cultural dimension’.
FROM THE ABSTRACT
Identity theft is rapidly expanding, causing substantial financial loss to millions of people all around the world. This invisible crime is also widespread across EU countries, where a growing number of citizens is targeted by sophisticated fraudulent attacks each year, both offline and online.
56% of Europeans have experienced at least one type of fraud in the last two years. European security officials speak of an “epidemic” created by a spike in demand from asylum-seekers and from terrorists carrying counterfeit documents to enter the EU. Security documents are increasingly being counterfeited or tampered with by criminals to facilitate transnational crime. The continued vulnerability of different types of identity and travel documents makes it extremely difficult to combat this problem.
AIM (WHAT)
SafeTravellers value proposition 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.
METHODOLOGY (HOW)
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.
IMPACT (WHY)
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.