DIACC targets biometric binding, connected registries to close cross-sector ID gap

The Digital ID and Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC) convened a meeting of representatives from the real estate, energy and finance industries in Vancouver this past April to discuss sector-specific problems stemming from a common gap. The gap they identified is between authoritative records and the person or entity presenting the record. Biometric identity binding is the solution to their common problems.

In real estate, the problem is ensuring that the person who holds the title to a property is the rightful owner. In energy, supply chain data is described in the report as “fragmented” and “low-integrity.” The problems of financial service providers who repeatedly perform identity verification for the same customers only to be burned by fraud are familiar to Biometric Update readers.

The 35-page “From Registries to Reality” report from DIACC sets out the observations and conclusions from the April Member Industry Workshop. The gap identified by participants means that organizations verifying attributes commonly cannot verify the person or  business they are connected to.

Workshop participants observed that the necessary infrastructure already exists, in the form of authoritative registries.

The challenge, then, is to make those registries interoperable. Taking this approach, rather than creating a new, centralized registry to serve all applications, avoids privileging any one platform, according to the report. The registries that already exist can already serve as digital trust infrastructure for connecting the three sectors, particularly in combination with the Pan-Canadian Trust Framework (PCTF).

DIACC notes that economic value is far more important to adoption than mandates, which motivate professionals much more so than the public.

Trust, don’t reverify

The most striking take-away among those offered by participants is that organizations do not trust third-party verification, leading them to reverify the same information again. Sensitive data that is not strictly necessary to store or transmit gets collected and moved via email, or curiously, USB drives, participants say. And verification remains largely a matter of manually collecting and visually inspecting paper documents.

This identity gap presents a structural bottleneck for real estate, energy and finance, the report says.

The standards that can enable the needed identity binding are being not just adopted by Canada, but also shaped by the country, DIACC says. The report refers to work in the province of British Columbia to credential raw minerals shipments based on the UN Transparency Protocol and co-lead the UN/CEFACT Critical Raw Materials Traceability and Sustainability project as one example of this leadership.

Credentials that utilize the necessary biometric binding during onboarding, with liveness and injection attack detection (IAD) to ensure robust protection against fraud, already provide the basis to connect different services. There are 2.6 million users of the BC Services Card, which is due to get a digital equivalent this year. The credential supports the province’s online public service portal, Connected Services BC. The government plans to add digital credentials to the system this year and deliver services on a “tell us once” basis by 2030.

Verifiable credentials allow organizations to verify claims without collecting or themselves verifying the data behind them.

DIACC also sets out an action plan with three next steps.

DIACC sees its own role in the journey as “Refactoring the PCTF into modular building blocks and industry profiles so that one framework can issue a land profile, an energy profile, and a finance profile from the same trust standard, and acting as the translator layer between regulation and on-the-ground implementation.”

Article Topics

biometric binding  |  biometrics  |  Canada  |  DIACC  |  identity verification  |  Pan-Canadian Trust Framework (PCTF)  |  verifiable credentials