IDEMIA Unveils LASINK™ Helios

IDEMIA has launched a new security feature, based on optically variable elements, that combines colour personalisation and DOVID technologies to secure secondary portraits.

Humans are equipped with fantastic innate pattern recognition ‘hardwired’ into our visual processing system. You only have to look at someone’s face, whom you haven’t met for years, for a few seconds to recall their identity and trigger memories of your previous meetings.

Machines can also be taught to gather and assess facial patterns, which makes the portrait on a secure document a doubly important security feature from the perspective of both human and machine inspection.

Protecting the portrait from copying, tampering or manipulation is essential to securing the document, which is why an increasing number of issuing authorities use a secondary portrait as an additional security feature. The secondary portrait validates the primary portrait, thus confirming to an inspector the identity of the document holder. Cross-referencing the primary and secondary portraits further increases their protection.

Mindful of this, IDEMIA, a leader in augmented identity, unveiled its latest ID security feature, LASINK™ Helios on 25 November. This innovation combines both laser colour personalisation and DOVID* technologies on the secondary portrait.

LASINK Helios is based on two technologies – holographic DOVID technology and LASINK. The latter is a colour technology developed by IDEMIA which is based on a matrix of red, green and blue lines.

According to Olivier Charlanes, SVP Global Business Development, Marketing & Product Offer, Public Security & Identity, IDEMIA, ‘as a colour portrait embedded into a DOVID, LASINK Helios meets the foundational requirement of all of IDEMIA’s ID security concepts: hard to reproduce but easy to inspect. The development of this new security feature is an illustration of how IDEMIA stays one step ahead of fraud. The Group demonstrates its ‘experience in producing tamper-proof documents and continuous innovation’.

Easy to inspect

LASINK Helios displays striking optical effects. These effects vary depending on the angle of viewing and are easily recognisable for both in-person or remote authentication, for instance using the device’s camera.

When the ID document is tilted upwards/downwards, the checkers (made of three coloured dots) positioned on the edge of the portrait will change colour. The full-colour image is revealed when the colour checkers show a combination of red/green/blue.

Non-specialists – eg. bank employees, hotel staff, retailers etc. – have little experience in document inspection but they are facing more and more scenarios where they are required to act as a frontline inspector. They will be able to easily authenticate the genuineness of an identity document, without the need for specific equipment.

As there is a growing number of situations in which verification of an identity document is required, IDEMIA designed the solution to be hard to reproduce but easy to inspect.

Hard to reproduce

Besides the main portrait, which is the most attacked feature of an ID document, the secondary portrait creates an additional level of security. It validates the main portrait, thus confirming the identity of the document holder. Interlinking both images make forgery incredibly difficult, thereby deterring any fraud attempts.

LASINK Helios is based on a holographic matrix, incorporated into the core of the blank document before lamination. An exclusive software application is needed to produce LASINK Helios. Fraudsters cannot use equipment that is available to the public to personalise the picture with the required optical effects. For the same reason, it is virtually impossible to create a single full reproduction of the document (anti-counterfeit) or modify the portrait (anti-forgery and anti-morphing).

LASINK Helios is available in two versions. The secondary portrait is either displayed as a standalone image with a sleek design, or LASINK Helios has a partially transparent side that covers the portrait, offering an additional layer of security. In this second version, it also contains a DID™ that changes colour when rotated through a 90° angle.

With this technology, IDEMIA says that it is addressing the concerns of many countries with regard to strengthening the security of their identity documents. LASINK technology already secures the ID documents of several countries including Estonia, Latvia, Morocco, Colombia, Costa Rica, Burkina Faso and Andorra.