CERTUS® Live Demo at the Verbier Festival

The Verbier Festival, of which SICPA is one of the main sponsors, gave us the opportunity to demonstrate the functioning of an innovative solution for securing people's access and identity. The first recipients of the solution were the young musicians of the Verbier Festival Junior Orchestra, who carried out a test with SICPA, which was as realistic as it was fun.

Traditional badges and tickets can all too easily be fraudulently transferred or misappropriated, thus opening up access to unauthorised individuals. SICPA therefore provided these young talents with badges incorporating our CERTUS® solution: a new generation QR code that looks innocuous, but includes secure identity data, access rights and, above all, an encrypted photo ID. 

Thanks to a dedicated control application, this QR code could be read at the entrance of the secure area of the festival, directly on the badge of each young musician, displayed on his or her personal smartphone or even on a simple printed sheet. The verifier could of course consult the access rights but also check that the young person's face matched the photo decrypted by the control application. He could thus - virtually - grant or deny access. For the purposes of the test, only three of the young talents were randomly given an invalid pass. And far from being a problem in the context of this experiment, this status detected at the entrance turned out to be the key to receiving an electronic tablet offered by SICPA, a useful tool for displaying and browsing their sheet music at a future concert!

All this sensitive identity information is directly integrated into SICPA's solution without the need for an external database, which is often the Achilles heel of this type of solution. Here, the data is in the user's pocket and does not need to pass through more or less secure networks. In the future, this solution could replace traditional documents including a certified photo ID, identity cards, driving licences, access badges, not to mention personal tickets for cultural and sporting events.

Photography © Lucien Grandjean