At the ICAO TRIP Symposium in Montreal this year, TOPPAN Security introduced CHROMA, a laser-based colour personalisation technology that aims to remove the longstanding trade-off between portrait quality and document security in polycarbonate identity documents. With claims to be the first laser system to deliver full-colour, photo-realistic portraits engraved within a polycarbonate body, CHROMA is targeted at passports, ID cards and other government-issued credentials.

Electrically controlled reflective films, as presented by Younjung Park and Heeyeon Kim of NANOSILIKHAN Advanced Materials, have taken a class of technologies long known in smart glazing and displays and adapted it specifically for high-security identification documents.

As artificial intelligence becomes ever more important to document authentication, new research warns that its strengths can also be its weaknesses. A study presented at the 2025 Optical & Digital Document Security™ conference in Warsaw shows how adversarial attacks can fool even the most accurate AI systems into verifying counterfeit documents as genuine.

Picture a quiet, rainy Sunday night in rural North Dakota. The roads are empty – until a car suddenly speeds past. A highway patrol officer pursues the speeding driver and signals them to pull over. Stepping out into the drizzle, the officer approaches the driver and asks for identification.

A new biometric barcode protocol from FaceTec promises to close the gap between documents and their holders – merging cryptography, biometrics and QR technology into a single, privacy-preserving identity layer.

Biometrics have become integral to modern identity systems, providing a means of binding the individual to the credential through unique physical traits. Their use spans enrolment for passports and eID (electronic ID) cards to border management and online authentication. Yet, as adoption expands, questions of governance, oversight, and technical resilience persist.

While identity documents and secure credentials form the majority of the content in this newsletter, ID & Secure Document News™ also has a remit to cover the use of technology to provide an identity to the products that we consume. As the digital infrastructure of the EU evolves, the Digital Product Passport (DPP) is emerging as a core regulatory instrument for product traceability and lifecycle data.

A Korean technology startup has developed what is believed to be the world’s first smartphone-based solution capable of simultaneously capturing facial and fingerprint biometrics using the built-in front and rear cameras of a mobile device. The innovation, created by WINNING.I, enables fully contactless multimodal biometric authentication through a single application, removing the need for additional hardware or multi-step user procedures.