IDEMIA Chosen by French Government for its National ID Verification Program

French government agency Agence Nationale des Titres Sécurisés (ANTS) will be teaming up with IDEMIA to support the national digital identity program, called ‘France Identité Numérique’.

With their consent, France residents accessing the service can prove their identity remotely by simply placing their eID card on the back of their mobile phone.

IDEMIA stated that many other secure online services will be offered and will be supported by the Agence Nationale de la Sécurité des Systèmes d’Information (ANSSI)-certified authentication system.

The new French national eID card (CNIe) was introduced in August 2021 (see IDN March 2021). It will allow consumers in France to carry out digital transactions with their smartphones.

Consumers will get an authentication request on their phones. French residents will then place their CNIe on the back of their mobile phone, which will communicate via Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology.

The mobile app will be able to securely read and authenticate the user data residing in the card’s chip. Consumers must give their consent before authentication.

The digital identity system will be offered with a First-Level security certificate from the French IT agency ANSSI. This means that it will adhere to EU eIDAS regulations; Substantial and High - which refer to the level of assurance provided when it comes to identifying the individual.

These assurance levels are based around the ISO/IEC 2915 standard and use two main types of assurance to define them.

• Identity assurance – refers to the systems in place to identify the individual when they register for the service.

• Authentication assurance – refers to the manner in which you look to verify that identity at the time of signing a document.

For the Substantial Assurance Level, you might verify the identification with an authority and require not only a password but also a One-Time Passcode (OTP) sent via SMS to complete the signature.

For the High Assurance Level, you would use the registration authority and then verify the identification using official government documentation and by a face-to-face meeting either in person or on a video call. At the time of signing a document, you need multi-factor identification and cryptographic protection through a public key infrastructure (PKI).

The system will aim to protect users’ identity information and ensure that only the approved residents can exercise control over it.

The FranceConnect platform, which underpins the new program, has reportedly attracted more than 28 million users and 900 service providers. French residents will soon have the option to securely access these services with their digital IDs.

Having implemented more than 135 online and offline ID programs across the globe, IDEMIA says that its expertise is allowing it to meet governments’ requirements for agile and secure user databases, ID documents and online authentication of clients’ IDs.