ID Document Content

The ID verification solution service analyzes identity documents, driving licenses, passports, among others (we cover more than 190 countries with 500 different documents, all passports regulated by ICAO are also covered please visit Veridas website). It provides an optical character recognition (OCR) extraction and a validation process using multiple security features.

Identity documents vary depending on geographic regions, versions, and their use. They usually contain information on both the front and the back (there are few cases where information is only present on the front). The ID document can be described in two types of information. The first one VIZ(Visual Inspection Zone), where the information about the owner of the ID document appears it can be read but is not intended or defined to be read by a machine. It is contained by these items:

• Face: Photograph of the face of the person identified by that document.
• OCR nodes: They contain the written information of the document such as names, surnames, dates, identification number, support number, addresses, etc.
• Physical security features: Physical security measures such as OVI inks, micro-writing, Kinegrams, etc.

The second one is intended to be read by machines and can be subdivided into tree subcategories MRZ(Machine Readable Zone), Bidimensional codes ( PDF417, Code128, Code39, QR), and phisical chips (NFC). This kind of data contains information and security related to the VIZ.

MRZ

Document area in which information adapted to be read by a machine appears. It is more reliable than the VIZ. It follows a standard defined by ICAO. There are differnte types, two lines (passport) or three lines (identification cards).

All the details regarding MRZ are explained in the ICAO standard:

• Machine Readable Travel Documents - Part 3: Specifications Common to all MRTDs
• Machine Readable Travel Documents - Part 4: Specifications for Machine Readable Passports (MRPs) and other TD3 Size MRTDs

A checksum is added to the numbers in the MRZ (dates and numbers of the documents) to increase the reliability of the reading. These checksums follow the 731 rule, page 27 section 4.9.

Two-dimensional codes: PDF417, Code128, Code39

Items with information that appear in documents. It is necessary to decode them to obtain the information they have. Sometimes they are a single number recurrency and other times fields with information about the person or document.

Near Field Communication (NFC) chip

Currently, the most modern documents have an RFID chip that, through NFC reading capabilities, can be decoded on mobile devices. This technology can only be used in cases of native applications (iOS and Android).

This chip usually slams the data of the travel document and the biometric data of the holder: her face. The data is usually organized in data groups DG1, DG2, SOD, etc. This data comes on the chip digitally signed by the issuing country, which must maintain a public key infrastructure (PKI). This public key allows to protect and prove the authenticity and integrity of the data in the chip and the link with the issuer. Therefore, the reading of this chip is the highest security standard in the market.

The standard set by ICAO can be found here.