Now that the EU Entry/Exit System (EES) is fully operational, it represents the largest expansion of biometric data collection at European borders in history. Third-country nationals entering the Schengen Area have their facial image and fingerprints captured, their biographical data recorded, and their entry and exit registered — replacing the manual passport stamp. The scale is significant: an estimated 285 million third-country national crossings per year.

Why self-service kiosks?

EES is designed to be implemented primarily through self-service kiosks — automated terminals where travellers register and complete their biometric capture themselves, reducing the burden on border officers and enabling higher throughput. But self-service introduces a new vulnerability: when the only witness to a biometric capture is the machine, the entire burden of detecting fraudulent presentation falls on the automated system.

Real-time detection at scale

The requirements for PAD in an EES deployment are demanding. Detection must occur in real time — adding no perceptible delay to the traveller’s interaction with the kiosk. It must be robust across the full range of known attack types and across the enormous demographic and environmental diversity of international travel. Meeting these requirements requires PAD algorithms that are both accurate and computationally efficient — capable of running on embedded hardware within the kiosk without dedicated GPU resources.

Integration with border workflows

An EES kiosk PAD system does not operate in isolation. When a potential attack is detected, it must trigger a clearly defined response — alerting a border officer without disrupting the wider queue, logging the event with sufficient detail for subsequent investigation, and providing the officer with information useful for a secondary manual check.

The EINSTEIN project’s Smart EES Kiosk application, led by IDEMIA Public Security, is developing and field-testing exactly these capabilities, working directly with eu-LISA to ensure alignment with the operational requirements of the EES system.

© 2026 EINSTEIN Consortium. EINSTEIN is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme (GA No. 101121280) and by UKRI (IFS 10093453). Views expressed are those of the authors only. www.einstein-horizon.eu