Costa Rica: the art of passport security

Simple, secure process

The technology from Veridos makes the process of obtaining a new passport simple, quick, and secure. When a citizen applies for a passport, their fingerprints and facial image are captured electronically at either the Directorate’s offices, the Bank of Costa Rica, a post office, or one of the country’s consulates around the world, with those details stored in a secure database hosted by the Costa Rican government.

The biometric data is then saved to a chip in the cover of a citizen’s passport, providing the ability for border teams to quickly perform identity verification. That also makes the passport fully compliant with global standards for identification.

The passport’s pages feature more than 60 other security features, including holographic effects, microtext, security threads, intaglio, latent images, relief patterns, multiple laser images, and flipbook animations – some visible to the human eye, others not. But some of the most innovative elements sit within the passport’s main data page.

By using polycarbonate (rather than cotton-based paper), the passport’s all-important data page has been made highly durable, to the point where it will outlast the expiry of any passport. But it also means that security features can be directly embedded into different layers of the polycarbonate page, making it virtually impossible to counterfeit.  

Taking advantage of the properties of polycarbonate, the new Costa Rica data page features multiple laser-engraved images and security features, including a transparent portrait window and a holographic strip. “It is the first passport in the whole of the Americas region to include a true color photo on a polycarbonate page,” highlights José Rolando Colchado, Managing Director of Veridos Mexico. The technical feat of creating a bright, clear image on polycarbonate was achieved through the use of Veridos’ highly innovative Clip ID technology. And it’s a passport technology that is already well-proven, having been in use across Bangladesh’s 72 domestic passport offices since 2020.

Form plus function

The passport’s other visa pages – made from cotton paper – are printed with intricate artwork that acts as a canvas for further security.

While countries issuing new passports often rely on third-party partners to execute much of the artistic design work and provide suitable motifs that represent the country, Costa Rica wanted a more hands-on and local touch. The General Directorate of Migration and Immigration commissioned its own team at Esencial Costa Rica (Marca País) to lead the artistic design of the document.  

Their brief was to showcase four important facets of the country: biodiversity, renewable energy, education and peace, and talent. These are represented in a series of stunning motifs showing plants, animals, ancient monuments, and other elements that are unique to the country’s different regions and world-famous biodiversity. Veridos teams then created those designs in sets of security backgrounds using microtext, latent patterns, and guilloche, among other techniques.

“We worked very actively with Marca País to ensure we captured all the nuances of their designs and to turn those into security patterns, whether that involved a hammerhead shark, a tree frog, or a page featuring the country’s mysterious pre-Columbian stone spheres,” says Colchado. “Every single visa page is different and every single element on those – as beautiful as they may be – is a security measure.”