Connection established: collaboration drives MOSIP’s digital identity gains

Connection is the beginning of any successful digital exchange, but transmission must follow, and content is king. The exhibition was closed but the lively conversation on the future of inclusive digital ID backed by open-source technology continued on day three of MOSIP Connect 2025 in Manila, Philippines.

One of the central themes emerging from the event is that while the lines of communication are open and yielding positive results, stakeholders are often left wondering: What do countries really need?

The community showed significant interest in verifiable credentials, and to a slightly lesser extent decentralized digital identity. Inclusivity remained a major focus, as at MOSIP Connect 2024. The 2025 edition only increased the emphasis on collaboration with other organizations, with technical experts from groups including the OpenID Foundation and the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure providing in-depth explanations of how their work can further the goals of MOSIP implementations.

Developments over the past year, such as the launch of the Decode hackathon and Create initiative, the MACP biometric device certification program and Claim 169 were shared with the community. New initiatives may also be born from the feedback gathered at the event, or even the event itself. There was significant interest in packaging technologies as “MOSIP-in-a-box” or “Government-in-a-box” for easy implementation. Claim 169 has its genesis in community feedback (see below).

Officials from countries that have experience implementing MOSIP like the Philippines and Ethiopia shared insights with other countries nearer the beginning of the MOSIP integration process, and even some that are considering adopting it.

Philippines Statistics Authority (PSA) and Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) were well represented at the event, exploring how to deliver more services to more people digitally.

Africa is the continent leading the world in MOSIP adoption, but several countries each from Asian and Latin American have already engaged with the organization. Several additional nations from around the world were present in Manila to explore whether MOSIP is right for them, or to plan the specifics of their pilot.

Workshops to enable operationalization

The third day of the event featured a series of workshops, touching on customizing MOSIP, essential components to integrate with the platform, the Inji digital wallet, how relying parties can build use-cases for digital ID and integrating the eSignet digital identity verification solution. The Digital Public Goods Alliance and Co-Develop held an extended workshop on “ensuring inclusion through digital public infrastructure using DPGs,” and the Open Wallet Foundation ran a workshop on collaborations for interoperability with digital wallets.

A pair of workshops on OpenG2P will be detailed in an article as part of Biometric Update’s ongoing coverage of Connect 2025.

Biometric QR Codes

Feedback from West Africa Unique Identification for Regional Integration and Inclusion Project (WURI) members at least year’s MOSIP Connect helped drive the development of Claim 169, Head of Engineering SasiKumar Ganesan said during a workshop on the biometric QR codes. Several representatives of WURI nations also contributed to MOSIP Connect 2025.

Claim 169 compresses data, including a facial image, into 1005 bytes, using version 20 of the QR code spec.

MOSIP has also presented Claim 169 to ICAO, which is also working on QR codes for identification through its Digital Travel Credentials project. Ganesan said he hoped to engage further with the aviation body soon.

MOSIP is also exploring homomorphic encryption for fingerprints to mask them within QR codes.

At the same time, MOSIP would like to challenge biometrics developers to produce better matching algorithms for QR-embedded images.

There are 30 countries around the world currently verifying IDs offline, Sam Jefferies of UNHCR said during a day one session on Claim 169.  Sixteen are issuing IDs offline. UNHCR found in an ASEAN region country that people were showing IDs that had strong security features, but were fake. Hence the importance of digital signatures to show that the data a credentials carries can be trusted.

Ameya Bhagwat of Tech5 noted that while there were some challenges in the Claim 169 project around compressing data, he notes that you also have to have an effective platform to consume it. Tech5 has worked with Ethiopia to implement Claim 169 there.

Prior to Claim 169, as discussed during the Thursday workshop, some countries had issued their own QR codes to support offline verification for travel between countries. The lack of trust and standardization necessitated something stronger. At the same time, governments do not want to issue relatively expensive NFC-based cards that can be easily lost. The digital signatures in Claim 169 codes addresses this issue, though they are only suitable for certain use cases, Ganesan cautions.

If they can be used to reduce border-crossings that have previously taken days, that use case alone will make them valuable.

The Tuesday panel was hosted by Mahammed Taheer of MOSIP, and also included Nirav Shah of PwC.

MOSIP integrating BQAT

Dr. Ted Dunstone, who in addition to his leadership of BixeLab and Biometix is also the Chair of MOSIP’s Technical Committee, delved into measuring biometric quality in a pair of Thursday workshops.

The first was co-hosted by Alan Turing Institute Technical Development Manager Dr. Mark Hooper, and the second by MOSIP Head of Partner Ecosystem Sanjith Sundaram.

Dunstone explained the relationship between biometric accuracy, quality and vulnerability to start a workshop on measuring biometric quality. Sample quality, he noted, is a function of character (such as scars that affect fingerprints), fidelity and utility, as noted in ICO/IEC 29794. In the case of face biometric bias, the problem is often with the sensor.

But a variety of conditions can also affect biometric quality. Dunstone recounts a project for a European airport in which it was determined that the fingerprint biometric system worked well, except before 6 am. The reason, it turned out, is that passengers had to cross the tarmac in cold weather, making their hands cold to the point of affecting sample quality.

The variety of potential factors makes quality assessment, such as with the open-source Biometric Quality Assessment Tool (BQAT), a valuable exercise to help identify necessary adjustments. MOSIP is currently in the process of integrating BQAT.

Hooper explained how synthetic data can help mitigate bias in biometric systems. Fully, partially or hybrid synthetic data can help tune algorithms trained with unbalanced datasets, reducing performance differentials. Less commonly understood is that the same is true for fingerprints.

Hooper asked Dunstone if the anecdotes of fingerprint quality being commonly affected by harsh manual labor are supported by science. Dunstone replied in the affirmative, but noted that good fingerprint scanners mitigate heavy impact from worn or damaged fingerprints, particularly if they measure subdermal layers.

During the following session, on MOSIP’s biometric component compliance program, Sundaram revealed that Ingenium has reached the point of technical onboarding on its way to becoming the second lab qualified to perform MACP certification.

BixeLab is about to do another round of evaluations, Dunstone says, and invited biometric device providers among the roughly 45 attendees to participate.

The workshop closed with a discussion of the role of MOSIP’s certification process for biometric scanners relative to those from NIST in the U.S. and STQC in India.

MOSIP is growing and evolving at a pace that is assisted by feedback from the community, while also making it incumbent on all involved to ensure that connection works both ways.

 

Follow all our coverage from MOSIP Connect 2025.

Article Topics

Biometric Quality Assessment Tool (BQAT)  |  BixeLab  |  Co-Develop  |  Digital Public Goods Alliance DPGA  |  MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform)  |  MOSIP Connect 2025  |  Turing Institute