Company News

Scytl to Help UAE Hold First Fully Digital Elections

Scytl, a leader in online voting and electoral modernisation, has won a contract to facilitate online voting in the national elections to the Federal National Council of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to the contract signed between the company and the Ministry of State for Federal National Council Affairs (MFNCA), Scytl will contribute to the UAE becoming the first country in the world to hold an entirely digital election.

For the first time, the country will introduce online voting so that citizens can exercise their right to vote from any device with an internet connection. This also includes Emiratis who are outside the country during the election, with online voting replacing traditional paper-voting methods.

This system will be combined with in- person internet voting at polling stations through electronic voting kiosks, a digital channel that the country has used in previous elections.

For this project, Scytl will be responsible for providing the electoral technology necessary for the development of the elections. To achieve this, it will launch an online platform from which Emiratis can elect members to the Federal National Council from any device with an internet connection, authenticating themselves with facial recognition.

The CEO of Scytl, Raoul Roverato, recalls that ‘this is the fourth time that the country has entrusted us with its elections to the Federal National Council and, although for Scytl it has always been an exciting project, this year it is even more so because of the milestone it represents in the history of governmental elections: the first fully digital process.’

Regula Wins Technology Award Gold

Regula, a global developer of forensic devices and identity verification solutions, has been declared a recipient of a 2023 Merit Technology Award. As a first-time nominee, the company won the highest honour—the gold.

The Merit Awards, an independent program recognising global industries, assesses the nominees’ impact on their respective markets when determining the winners. Regula was judged to have excelled in Cybersecurity, one of the Technology Awards subcategories.

‘As a developer of hardware and software for document and biometric verification, we are actively combating the increasing threats alongside cybersecurity providers. Alarmingly, more and more companies are encountering deepfake technology in identity verification. Based on our worldwide survey, 37% of organizations encountered incidents of deepfake voice fraud, while 29% were targeted by deepfake videos just last year. To address these challenges, we leverage cutting- edge technologies to continually advance our solutions,’ Ihar Kliashchou, Chief Technology Officer at Regula said.

Deepfakes are often involved in biometric fraud, specifically in the form of

presentation attacks. Therefore, biometric verification, such as comparing a live selfie image with the visible portrait in the document and the one encoded in the RFID chip in electronic IDs, is a must.

This guiding principle is at the core of the development of robust identity verification solutions, which combine biometric checks with cross-checks of user information.

Workforce360 Selects authID for Onboarding

authID, a leading provider of innovative biometric identity verification and authentication solutions, and Workforce360, an international recruitment platform, have signed an agreement to deploy authID’s identity verification services to automate identity document collection and streamline the delivery of trusted candidates to their network of recruitment agents and enterprise customers.

Responding to the increasing need for skilled and unskilled labourers in Gulf Corporation Council (GCC) countries, Workforce360 presents a suite of digital solutions designed to streamline the process of overseas recruitment. At the forefront is its Global Recruit Applicant Tracking System, providing employers a transparent platform to efficiently recruit overseas manpower at scale.

Workforce360 will speed up candidate recruitment by deploying authID’s document-based identity verification that automates authentication of over 12,000 government IDs and passports from 200 countries and territories. Offering an easy, intuitive user experience delivered in any browser, along with OCR and auto-population of credential data into the Workforce360 platform, authID helps Workforce360 drive hiring efficiencies with fast, streamlined onboarding.

OIX Pushes Back on Governments

The Open Identity Exchange (OIX) has published a paper – Governments and Digital Wallets – recommending that governments do not provide their own ID wallets to citizens and outlining why this would be the wrong approach.

The OIX is a global non-profit organisation that has been working across sectors, borders and with governments, to ensure that digital ID works well for organisations that will come to accept digital credentials.

According to the OIX, there are vast costs associated with issuing and managing a wallet, and the development requirements will be extremely technical and complex. Governments are not best placed to maintain these effectively.

Based on OIX’s research of digital ID trust frameworks across the globe, the paper outlines four key models of how governments might choose to interact with the world of digital wallets.

1. Government provides silo wallet to hold government issued credentials only.

In this model, the government ID wallet model cannot be used to store private sector credentials, although non- government issued credentials may be accepted in some specific use cases when authenticating into a government service.

2. Government provides a wallet to hold both government and private sector issued credentials.

In this second model, government provides an ID wallet that contains government credentials, including a trust anchor, and integrates private sector credentials. However, private sector wallets are not allowed to hold government issued ID credentials.

3. Government wallet to hold government issued credentials that co-exist with approved private sector wallets to hold government issued credentials.

4. Government does not provide a wallet – but allows approved private sector wallets.

The OIX report recommends that the role of governments should be to create strong trust frameworks that enable the approval and trust of private sector provided wallets. This includes the tech giants, such as Google and Apple, that may want to hold and present government credentials in their wallets. Government credentials can then be issued only into these approved private sector wallets.