IDENTICA

The IDENTICA project focus on the design and implementation of a distributed authentication platform based on secure RFID-enabled personal documentation and advanced identity validation mechanisms. For this purpose, IDENTICA applies and improves diverse biometric techniques (e.g. facial image, iris and voice recognition), as well as multimodal biometrics researching on the optimum combination of different biometrics in real world conditions. The project also aims to the establishment of trusted networks and the coordination between multiple institutions and organizations for the secure identification of individuals.

In this context, the role of NICS focuses on the integration of RFID technology in personal documentation including the design and implementation of adequate security mechanisms in order to enable access control and ensure confidentiality and integrity of data stored in a tag, therefore providing the secure storage and access of biometrics and personal data from RFID tags to the authentication platform.

As a result, in this project our group has introduced our concept of secure hybrid documentation, analyzed the weaknesses of security mechanisms in the most representative examples of documentation taking this hybrid approach to-date and provided suitable alternatives which improve the security properties of hybrid documents. We have also provided a robust and reliable key management infrastructure to manage the keys required for access the tag and establish a secure communication channel in RFID-based documents. A fully functional prototype implementation of the secure hybrid documents and key management infrastructure was provided based on NXP SmartMX RFID cards and the open-source JMRTD and Symkey projects.