GD Burti, the Brazilian subsidiary of Giesecke & Devrient, has met the security requirements to issue Brazilian eID cards.

The high-security Registry of Civil Identity cards have been granted certification by Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia da Informação, Brazil’s IT authority. GD Burti has delivered more than one million cards as part of an initial pilot project. RIC cards store biometric data and will make it easier for Brazilian nationals to visit other Mercosur treaty states.

Public Key Infrastructure ensures additional security for the ID, which guarantees the authenticity of the data stored on the chip. The card enables each Brazilian citizen to be registered under a single number valid nationwide. That eliminates one of the biggest security risks of the country’s current ID documents, which require multiple registrations in the various federal states under different registration numbers.

The RIC card is a hybrid card containing both a contact-based and a contactless module. The latter comprises a travel application that complies with the standards of the International Civil Aviation Organization and will facilitate travel between the Mercosur treaty states. Both a photographic image of the ID holder and the holder’s fingerprints are stored on the RIC card.

What is more, a variety of optical and electrical security features protect the RIC card against forgery and enable citizens to verify a card’s authenticity quickly. These include integrated kinegrams, guilloches and other optical elements such as microtext or rainbow print.