Five trends reshaping identity
The reinvention of identity is being driven by some major technological shifts:
Your biometrics, your identity
Biometric data, which securely links an individual’s unique physical or behavioral characteristics to their identity, is an essential component of every digital identity future. From fingerprint and facial recognition to palm vein and iris scanning, biometrics are already embedded in many physical and digital checks on identity. And the proliferation of biometrics will only continue.
For example, to deal with the anticipated growth of passenger flow at airports, automated border control solutions are allowing travelers to perform self-service ID verification by using biometrics, allowing them to pass through eKiosks, typically without any intervention from border control.
Cryptographic reassurance
The sophisticated features that ensure the secure use of physical ID documents, such as holograms and optically variable devices, make them inherently secure and trustworthy. But with digital ID, identities need to be secured in a very different way. Cryptographic techniques can provide foolproof levels of data integrity and confidentiality to digital IDs by tying an individual’s identity to cryptographic keys. That prevents unauthorized alterations and ensures that only trusted parties can access the user’s information.
Moreover, cryptographic authentication verifies the authenticity of the mobile ID via digital signatures, providing assurance that the ID is issued by a legitimate authority and belongs to the person presenting it. That said, the approach won’t last forever. The widely predicted viability of quantum computers in the near future is likely to put today’s cryptography-based systems at risk – a situation that has sent developers in search of quantum-proof cryptography.
Individual control through self-sovereign identity
As a mechanism that gives users control over which aspects of their digital identity they wish to share, self-sovereign identity (SSI) is emerging as an important way to manage and safeguard individual digital identities. It allows people to use their digital identity to securely and efficiently access all kinds of services with minimum disclosure of their unique information. For example, a person seeking access to an over-18 performance venue can provide the necessary verifiable credentials to establish their age, but communicate nothing else.
Ensuring the co-existence of online and offline ID
In today’s world, individuals increasingly expect to be able to seamlessly navigate between offline and online realms, with consistent, secure identity authentication and verification across a mix of form factors. And that will only increase as the scope of digital interaction grows.
Someone might choose to make a secure bank transfer on a mobile phone (with the help of face recognition), for example, then use their debit card to withdraw cash. And, when available, they may choose to send their mobile ID as proof of identity when opening a new bank account, rather than having to present an image of their passport, ID card, or driver’s license.
The ability to interconnect such physical and digital activities will be a key challenge for agencies in the evolving landscape of identity management, and that will require comprehensive solutions that safeguard identity at multiple authentication points across diverse platforms and systems.
Leveraging AI to protect identity
Artificial intelligence (AI) presents tantalizing opportunities and major challenges for both physical and digital identity. There are already countless applications across the identity ecosystem with many more in development. It is being used extensively to enhance the speed and accuracy of identity authentication, to create synthetic versions of an individual person’s portrait so they can be recognized even as their appearance changes, and to detect data inconsistencies and attempts at deception. But it is also being used by bad actors to undermine the integrity of individual identities through techniques such as deep fakes and image morphing.