The Horizon 2020 project Smart-Trust aimed to develop “biometrics on the move” technology to realize “seamless” and secure border checks without the need for physical documents, solely relying on a traveller’s smartphone.
Its “agile, highly configurable, modular and open architecture” platform was meant to feature among its core components:
– Mobile ID services and app, for “mobile identity enrolment and verification services”
– “Analytics and Risk-Assessment, an industrial-strength real time analytics platform able to deliver professional customized monitoring dashboards as well as detecting passenger trends and anomalies.”
These solutions, which were developed by the Portuguese company Vision Box to be compatible with the EU’s Entry-Exit System (also built on solutions developed by Vision Box), are framed in the project description as allowing an efficient management of the ever-growing number of passengers that the air industry “is witnessing”, maximizing travellers’ comfort while not compromising on security.
By allowing the storage of “multiple ID documents (such as passport, citizen ID card, membership cards) in a smartphone”, authentication becomes “hands-free”. “In this way”, reads a rare “success story” published by the EU Commission, “the mobile phone becomes the single means of identification for travellers throughout their entire journey.”
The project is extremely ambitious, promising a “first-class solution” for a “complete paperless and contactless travel experience”, and adopting a rhetoric that at times reads more like a press release for a Vision Box product than the official presentation of a EU project funded with public money in the public interest. For example, when the Smart-Trust description writes that “In a world where mobile is king, Vision-Box Mobile ID™ technology goes one step further and transforms the way people identify themselves”.
We know that face recognition and fingerprint scanning are involved, but it is hard to pin down what “biometrics on the move” mean on a more specific technical level with the scant information that is available to the public.
Vision Box’s own description of the “Mobile ID” services and app list functionalities such as “biometric capture”, “liveness detection” and “biometric matching”. A short video presentation on YouTube adds a “pre-registration” function “before reaching the border crossing point”.
It is also unclear how the “Analytics and Risk-Assessment” platform is supposed to detect “passenger trends and anomalies”, together with what these would amount to more precisely.
Further core technical components of Smart-Trust include
– TrustChain, “a blockchain-based infra-structure to assert citizen transactions in a distributed and self-regulatory fashion”, and
– Workflow Orchestration, “a workflow management component which caters for stakeholder-driven business rules”.
Besides the obvious relationship with later projects aimed at developing more detailed and sophisticated solutions for “biometrics on the move”, such as SafeTravellers, PopEye and CarMen, there is no publicly available material detailing relationships between Smart-Trust and other EU-funded projects.
We do know however that Vision Box, the only subject responsible for the Smart-Trust project, was also involved in several EU-funded projects in border security, such as ABC4EU, iMARS and ODYSSEUS.
Smart-Trust is depicted as successful on Cordis. Thanks to its “pioneering biometric technology”, deployable both at border controls and checkpoints, “border entry” is allegedly “made easier, faster and more secure”.
More specifically, the developed “Mobile ID” biometric technology “scores high marks” in experiments at “typical” airport settings, including a satisfaction survey with nearly 1,600 test subjects in which “67 % considered the process very quick and 70 % easy to use, while 93 % were interested in using the solution on their phone next time they travelled”.
Two pilots were conducted in 2019 at the Schiphol (Amsterdam) and Lisbon airports, after a first year in which “the mobile ID concept has been tested in internal pilots with hundreds of people, yielding thousands of individual tests”. In the Lisbon pilot, for example, real passengers were invited to participate by passing through eGates by using an experimental mobile ID. Importantly, this pilot premiered a first application of the “biometrics on the move” notion, which Frontex attributes as its own. Passing through Lisbon at the right time, wrote the agency, could in fact let you “experience the future of border control”. A future in which “Instead of standing in queue to show your passport to border guard, travellers are able to cross the border almost seamlessly thanks to face recognition and touchless scanning of fingerprints”.
According to official material, “Face recognition was used as a test in a scenario for positive identification in a normal airport environment, with cooperative non-habituated users”, yielding “6,275 transactions over a 40 days period” and investigating aspects such as “failure to enrol”, matching errors and throughput rates.
Market-readiness was the goal of the Smart-Trust solution: “By the end of the project”, wrote an analysis by the European Commission, “SMART-TRUST aims to have brought an innovative product, Mobile ID™, to industrial readiness and maturity for market introduction. It will then be ready to be commercialised and deployed in major international airports on a global scale”.
The Smart-Trust project stands out for two critical facts.
The first one is that only three deliverables are public, more than 5 years after project completion. Also, all of them are related to dissemination aspects, i.e. concerning the project’s logo, website, promotional material, social media accounts and the events to which consortium members participated. No substantial/technical information on the project’s outputs, exploitation and mitigation strategies is provided, and no information concerning ethical/privacy reviews is available.
The second one is that, contrarily to all the other EU-funded projects we analyzed, Smart-Trust was not performed by a Consortium of diverse subjects (ranging from academia to LEAs and the security industry), but by a single private company, the Portuguese Vision Box, which received 2,1 million euros in EU funding for this project alone.
It also received 338k euros as part of the SafeTravellers consortium, 460k as part of iMARS (on countering face manipulation techniques), and 437k for ODYSSEUS (a smartphone and risk assessment-based solution for seamless border crossings thanks to biometric tech). This means that the company amassed some 3 million euros from the EU just for these projects.
Vision Box however also took additional 2,55 million euros as a member of the Consortium for the FP7-funded project ABC4EU — significantly more than what was awarded to very project coordinator, the Spanish INDRA, which was awarded 1,89 million euros. Interestingly, according to Vision Box itself, ABC4EU (2014-2018) is a first attempt at implementing the idea of a European “Entry-Exit System”.
On its website, Vision Box promises “A world where the travel experience feels effortless” — a definition that speaks the same language of EU-funded projects in border security.
Also, “Vision-Box provides end-to-end solutions that combine a comprehensive software platform with seamless and contactless state-of-the-art equipment, making a travel journey feel effortless.”
The company boasts to have some 150.000 solutions deployed in more than 100 countries all over the globe, accounting for “30%+” of the “Global Market share in Automated Border Control”, with more than “2 billion users processed”.
At the tech level, and specifically to border control, it boasts “live multimodal biometric capture” and “state-of-the-art biometric matching between live captures and the data contained in the e-document or a secured backend system”.
Vision Box shares the obsession for “seamless” border crossing solutions that much of the industry has been pushing for over the last decades, promising to connect “travellers and stakeholders from home to destination in a completely frictionless and contactless seamless experience”, and offering “seamless mobile”, “seamless kiosk”, “seamless desk”, “seamless assistant”, and “seamless gate” in its portfolio.
Vision Box is also crucially involved in pilots for the forthcoming implementation of the EU’s Entry/Exit System (EES), registering all non-EU nationals travelling for a short stay in Europe. Vision Box claims to have been involved in a trial of the EES at a Bulgaria land border (with Frontex, in 2021), and to have started replacing “traditional border controls of Third-Country Nationals with fully digital passenger processing and automated biometric data collection” at the Helsinki Airport in Finland, in 2019.
On the technical side, the company provided its “Seamless Journey Platform“. It consists of “a collaborative ecosystem of real-time data orchestration able to integrate biometric devices into third-party systems, guaranteeing interoperability between travel stakeholders’ multiple external systems such as Border Management Systems, Airport Passenger Processing Platforms, Airlines DCS, Ship property management systems, among others.”
Its functions include, among others, “FINDER”, which “Provides real-time information about all the travellers and enables users to have the best-informed decision by knowing the traveller’s last known position and facilitating operations.”
The company specifies in a dedicated brochure that “last known position” “is not in one place is now the entire journey, from mobile to boarding, giving to the user full control and capability to have the best informed decision”.
Lastly, the Smart-Trust project was identified in its official website (now only reachable in its archived version) by the extremely problematic claim according to which “Your Face is Worth a Million Tokens”.
