This Company Wants to Make Passports Obsolete

A passenger waits in line with her passp
Chicago, UNITED STATES: A passenger waits in line with her passport 23 January, 2007 before her Mexicana Air flight out of Chicago O'Hare International airport in Chicago, Illinois. As of 23 January, all Americans, Mexicans, Canadians and Bermudians traveling by air to the United States must for the first time carry a passport, said the Department of Homeland Security. The new measure is part of the department's Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, following the recommendations of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission. It is aimed at making it more difficult for terrorists to enter the country with fake documents. AFP PHOTO/JEFF HAYNES (Photo credit should read JEFF HAYNES/AFP/Getty Images)
Photograph by Jeff Haynes—AFP via Getty Images

One company is reportedly developing a paperless passport.

De La Rue, a passport manufacturer and producer of British banknotes, is working on technology that would make carrying a physical passport obsolete. According to the Telegraph, it would instead allow travelers to essentially store their passports in their smartphones, similar to the way a boarding pass can now be saved on mobile technology. De La Rue chief executive Martin Sutherland told the Times that the company is already in the process of testing the paperless passport concept.

There are still a handful of obstacles De La Rue has to overcome in order to make this a reality, specifically those that challenge security including potential forgery or losing your phone.

Where passport technology currently stands, each document contains a chip that helps identify the traveler. As David Jevans of Proofpoint, a cybersecurity company, explained to the Telegraph, “Digital passports on your phone will require new hardware on the device in order to securely store the electronic passport so it cannot be copied from the phone. It will also have to be communicated wirelessly to passport readers, because doing it onscreen like an airline ticket QR code can be coped or spoofed.”

“Paperless passports are one of the many initiatives we are currently looking at,” a spokesperson for De La Rue told the Telegraph. “But at the moment it is a concept that is at the very early stages of development.”