Landqart and TECH5 Announce Partnership

Manufacturer of secure substrates Landqart and TECH5, an innovator in the field of biometrics and digital identity management, have announced a partnership agreement to provide a solution for certificate-based documents which are secure, durable, and biometrically verifiable against the holder.

The innovation is based on Landqart’s Durasafe Certify® paper-polymer composite substrate and TECH5’s Digital ID technologies for issuance and offline verification of Digital ID.

Certificates have traditionally been made safe from physical counterfeiting or adulteration by security printing, watermarks and other devices, but have not until now been particularly durable. But some certificates need to last many years (for example, educational qualification documents, land and property titles, or professional qualification certificates) and so a highly resistant and durable substrate can be an important factor in their useful longevity.

To address this market need, Landqart has drawn on its heritage in banknote and passport production to develop Durasafe Certify®, a paper-polymer composite substrate that can incorporate a variety of devices such as watermarks, security threads, fibres, fully transparent windows and half-windows exhibiting novel security features.

In addition to being security-print ready (for all the major printing techniques and inks), the substrate can be personalised using desktop and other machines – laser printers and inkjet printers for example – utilised by many issuing authorities in their current workflows.

Likewise, efforts to securely link such documents to their true owner have typically revolved around attempts to insert microchips into the substrate or indeed fully migrating them to smart cards, with all the attendant cost and complexity of the reader infrastructure needed to verify them. As such, it has traditionally been very difficult to trust that a certificate, no matter how physically secure the document itself might be, truly belongs to the person claiming it as their own.

‘Whether it is a fraudulent claim to a land title, ownership of a vehicle, educational qualification or a professional certification, the consequences can be dramatic; we all want the certainty of knowing that the surgeon performing our operation is indeed qualified to do so’, comments Rob Haslam, TECH5’s Strategic Advisor.

Rob has spoken before about this interface between physical documents and digital identities at the Optical & Digital Document Security (ODDS) Conference 2022 (Vienna 11-13 April) in his paper ‘The Digital/Physical Transition, Interface and Balance’, when he talked about the importance of binding a person’s identity to its legitimate owner.

To provide this link between document and holder, TECH5 has developed an economic and highly scalable platform for capturing a certificate holder’s personal data, including face and/or fingerprint biometrics, and encoding them in a printable form – called the T5-Cryptograph.

The certificate holder’s identity can be easily verified using a smartphone: the verifying party only needs to capture the T5-Cryptograph using the smartphone’s camera and verify it biometrically against the presenter’s face or fingers, a process that, again using the phone’s camera, takes only a few seconds. Since all the data to be verified resides in the T5-Cryptograph, verification can take place entirely offline; without the need to access and consult a database of personal data.

‘By combining an innovative new substrate that is more secure and more durable than anything else available on the market, with class-leading biometric encoding and verification capabilities, the partnership between Landqart and TECH5 brings to the certificate market an offering that leverages the latest technologies and is truly fit for purpose in a world where fraud is on the rise’, says Richard Perera, Director of Marketing Services at Landqart.

The new solution is already available to issuers and integrators via the two companies’ global partner networks.