Finnair and Finavia have piloted biometric authentication in air travel

Nixu Corporation
Press release on October 18, 2019 at 9 AM EEST

In the future, seamless travel technology will enable people to transfer from their home to the destination without showing any ID or travel documents. The SisuID initiative aims to tackle the obstacles of trust by co-operating with authorities and businesses.

Digitalization of travel business is advancing quickly but analyzing travel data in service silos is not enough to create a seamless customer experience. There are many different service processes in the passenger’s route from home to the airplane seat: transit to the airport, parking lot payment, baggage drop, check-in, security control, lounge area access, and boarding, to name a few.

One solution would be biometric authentication. For instance, facial recognition technologies already provide a way to identify the customer without any user interaction and deliver the services seamlessly in the blink of an eye.

Finnair and Finavia have been among the first ones to test the use of biometric authentication in air travel.

Finnair and Finavia are exploring together ways to clear away the obstacles from the passenger’s service flow. That’s why they decided to partner up with the Sandbox of Trust, a digital identity pilot initiative, that aims to create a new digital identity linking and authentication solution called SisuID. It provides an app that allows all citizens who carry an authentic ID document to identify themselves in digital services. The app uses facial recognition and matches it to the document information. If the user wishes, the collected biometric data can be used for authentication. The usage is based on user consent – the user controls the information shared.

During spring 2019, Finnair and Finavia studied the possibilities of using SisuID as the enabler of next-generation passenger authentication. The group, consisting of Sandbox of Trust, Finavia and Finnair representatives, examined the concept and service design, tech and architecture, official’s requirements, privacy regulation and other possible legal barriers.

The pilot project gave excellent knowledge and insight on technical and privacy aspects of deploying biometrics and digital identity in travel. There are still some barriers to overcome before new technologies can be implemented.

First, are the privacy related open questions. How the roles in handling biometric data should be agreed between the airline, airport, border control and the other stakeholders in the travel ecosystem? These questions could be addressed and tested in practice in future pilots within the Schengen area travel ecosystem.

Also, legislation regarding facial recognition will need to be studied further. Seamless passenger journey is a vision, Finavia and Finnair will continue to investigate the opportunities of biometric authentication and digital identities.  

The pilot findings are available at www.nixu.com/case/finnair_finavia

Further information:
www.sisuid.com
Joonatan Henriksson, Leader of SisuID-project, Nixu Corporation
joonatan.henriksson(at)nixu.com

Distribution:
Principal media
www.nixu.com

SisuID in Brief:
The Sandbox of Trust is a Finland-based digital identity initiative, led by cybersecurity company Nixu, Suomen Tilaajavastuu, Digital Living International, the Technology Industry of Finland, and funded by the pilot members together with The Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra. The Sandbox of Trust initiative established an open community that creates an authentication and digital identity platform called SisuID. It provides normal and strong authentication to service providers in public and private sector at low-cost. For users, it is free of charge. All the code generated by the community will be published as open source code to produce a national identification solution. The findings of SisuID pilots help to advance the digitalization of the identification and knowledge of public and private sector users. www.sisuid.com

Nixu in Brief:
Nixu is a cybersecurity services company on a mission to keep the digital society running. Our passion is to help organizations embrace digitalization securely. Partnering with our clients we provide practical solutions for ensuring business continuity, an easy access to digital services and data protection. We aim to provide the best workplace to our team of about 400 cybersecurity professionals with a hands-on attitude. With Nordic roots we serve enterprise clients worldwide. Nixu shares are listed on the Nasdaq Helsinki stock exchange.
www.nixu.com