Today, SICPA and other companies continue to work in partnership with government agencies and other authorized issuers of identity documents to develop secure, reliable, interoperable digital identification solutions. As part of the Department of Homeland Security’s Silicon Valley Innovation Program (SVIP), SICPA is engaged in a multi-stage effort to develop and pilot a solution that provides “the secure digital equivalent to secure physical credentials, without re-engineering their current processes and systems.”
While SICPA’s work as part of the SVIP program is focused specifically on supporting the development and implementation of a digital Green Card, the potential of the underlying technology is far-reaching. Another area where digital credentials hold potential value is in securing and streamlining the submission of ‘breeder documents’ – the identity-proving documents that allow an individual to obtain identification – for the issuance of REAL ID-compliant drivers licenses and identification. REAL ID refers to identification that meets the “minimum security standards for license issuance and production” established by the REAL ID Act. Implementing verifiable digital credentials for ‘breeder documents’ has the potential to greatly reduce costs, speed adoption, provide greater value to citizens, and provide greater DHS visibility into states’ REAL ID roll out.
Jason Rushton, Federal Solutions Manager at SICPA said there are potentially a number of different avenues to leverage digital solutions for REAL ID ‘breeder documents.’ “For example, we could follow the USCIS permanent resident card process and use the permanent resident card as a breeder document, or could go to another Federal agency like the passport office in the State Department, or we could put together a turnkey solution for state and county records like birth certificates, marriage licenses, and property deeds. Or we could go to the postal service to secure current address registrations. Or we could go to industry, who provide pay stubs and tax documents.” In each case, using the SVIP framework to provide secure, universally-readable digital credentials could meaningfully streamline and secure the process of providing these credentials as ‘breeder documents’ for REAL ID.
Even as the technical solutions continue to advance, however, alignment between organizations tasked with verification remains a barrier to the widespread adoption of digital credentials. According to Rushton, one of the challenges inherent in legacy approaches to identification is that the issuer and verifier organizations are not supervised. For example, “if a company has been printing marriage certificates in the same way for 100 years and they can’t affect who verifies them because they are in many different jurisdictions, then the issuing company can’t change their printing process because they can’t change everyone else’s verification process.” The key – and this is why the leadership of DHS and others is so critical – is to create inclusive frameworks for certifying the equivalency of digital credentials, thereby creating a platform for their adoption.
Bart Suichies, Head of Digital & Software at SICPA, added “the ‘superstructures’ are the key driver to the adoption of digital ID. This goes back to the older generation of blockchain solutions and the question of why it is so hard to implement blockchain solutions – it’s because you need to have everyone in the ecosystem on board.”
Now that digital identification technology and standards are maturing to a point where digital identification offers a secure and interoperable solution, issuers and verifiers need a catalyst – like a REAL ID program office – to endorse it as equivalent to more legacy forms of identification. Once the permission structure is in place, issuers and verifiers across many different areas – including federal government, state government, and the private sector – can ramp up the adoption of digital solutions. In the case of REAL ID ‘breeder documents,’ digital solutions promise to reduce barriers and make individual compliance with REAL ID simpler, while still providing a level of privacy citizens are comfortable with, which will increase REAL ID adoption.