ODDS 2022 – a Constant in an Industry in Transition

Experts, government representatives, technologists and commentators gathered in Austria’s stunning capital city of Vienna (11-13 April) to share recent technical developments in the fields of optical and digital document security.

The Optical & Digital Document Security™ (ODDS) Conference has its roots in the highly respected Optical Document Security™ Conference, held every two years since 1996, and Digital Document Security, a spin-off event first held in 2019.

In combining the two events, conference organisers Reconnaissance wanted to recognise the important role that optical technologies continue to play in securing identity documents as they transition to the digital domain.

Following the seminar on the first day of the event covering ‘International Standards’, which included an extensive review of ISO 18013-5: Mobile driving licence (mDL) application, the conference was opened (12 April) by Michael Fuchs, Austria Ministry of Interior, who stressed the continuing importance of protecting government issued documents against fraud.

Then, after the welcome address from Ian Lancaster, Conference Chair, the attendees were treated to a thought provoking and, at some points, contentious keynote address from author, advisor and commentator – David Birch.

The first technical session, ‘The Transition’, looked at three distinct approaches to bridging the gap between the physical and digital worlds. OeSD International (Austria), TECH5 (Switzerland) and COLOP Digital (Austria) each had their own strategy for the authentication of what are increasingly being called ‘phygital’ documents.

The paper from OeSD (Bridging the Gap Between the Physical and the Digital World) was particularly relevant to the location of the proceedings as its presenter, Claudia Schwendimann, explained that she used to work in the building that is now the conference hotel!

A lot has changed in the world of identity management since then, and Claudia announced the addition of a 2D barcode to the existing Austria National ID card and in the new passport due to come out in 2023. The chip will have up to 7 kbytes of storage, including a photo of the bearer. Claudia did, however, sound a note of caution with the news that delivery times for microchips are now running at close to two years!

Following from this, ‘New Approaches to Document Security’ contained an intriguing paper from Xavier Prost, Veridos Identity Solutions (Germany).

The presentation ‘Phygital IDs and the Vision and Implementation of a Federated eGovernment Ecosystem’ reviewed the European GAIA-X project which was initiated to enable a secure, open and sovereign use of data. Xavier asserted that in this way, self-determined decisions can be made on how and where data is stored, processed and used within the data infrastructure.

The project is forming a strong and growing alliance of companies, about half of which are SMEs, with representatives from different industries such as mobility, energy, manufacturing and finance.

For the remainder of the first day, the conference split into two parallel streams: one for securing identity and the other for protecting currency and payments. In common, they described the use of optical and physical technologies for protecting against existing and emerging threats to the integrity of documents of value.

The conference reconvened to a single stream for the second day (13 April) to tackle the topical issues of the role of optical and digital technologies in securing health status passports, before taking technical submissions in the areas of micro- and nano-optical structures and other new approaches to ID document security.

Future editions of ID & Secure Document News™ will cover a selection of the papers in greater detail, but if the panel discussion in the final session is anything to go by, the future evolution of optical and digital document security is set to play an important role in the transition to digital identity for some time to come.

The conference closed with the announcement that the next ODDS Conference will be held in Paris in February 2023.

And as attention now switches to Reconnaissance’s next secure document conference, Tax Stamp & Traceability Forum™, Malta, 16-18 May – don’t miss out on catching up with colleagues, customers and friends by registering now at taxstamptraceabilityforum.com.