For most of the history of travel, identity has been physical. The passport is a booklet. The visa is a stamp. The border check is a human being looking at a document and comparing it to a face. Even the biometric passport is fundamentally a physical object — one that happens to carry a digital chip inside. But the boundaries between physical and digital identity are dissolving.
What does phygital mean in practice?
A phygital identity system is one in which a person’s identity cannot be fully represented or verified in either the physical or digital domain alone. Consider a traveller who pre-registers their biometric data on a smartphone app, transmits a Digital Travel Credential to a border authority ahead of their journey, and then passes through a biometric corridor that matches their live face against both the pre-registered template and a chip-read from their physical passport.
Why the shift matters for fraud detection
The transition from purely physical to phygital identity changes the threat landscape. Physical document fraud — altering a passport photograph, cloning a chip — remains a concern but has become increasingly difficult as document security technology has advanced. The more dynamic threat is now at the digital interfaces: fraud in online identity application processes, manipulation of digital credentials, injection attacks that subvert the interface between capture hardware and processing software.
Interoperability as a security requirement
A phygital identity ecosystem only functions if its components are interoperable. This is why international standards — ICAO Doc 9303, ISO/IEC 29794-5, eIDAS 2.0 — are not just technical conveniences but security requirements. Without them, phygital identity degenerates into a patchwork of incompatible siloes, each with its own vulnerabilities and none capable of providing the end-to-end assurance that modern border management requires.
© 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