ShoCard in collaboration with multinational Swiss-based air transport IT company SITA is exploring blockchain technology for digital identity management that stores travelers ID details.

The technology provides the opportunity to allow secure biometric authentication of passengers and anyone can retrieve and prove your identity whenever they need to. This identity app was formally launched during the Air Transport IT Summit industry conference, held in Barcelona, Spain yesterday.

The app focuses on both streamlining how airlines verify passenger identities as well as facilitating real-time data flows at the airport. The process behind this technology is that, scanned documents can be sealed with a public and private key. The documents are encrypted, hashed, and anyone can verify their authenticity using the public key. Passengers could share this public key by scanning a QR code for example and would generate a Single Travel Token with all their travel documents using ShoCard.

Explaining about this, Jim Peters, CTO at SITA said, “Blockchain technology offers us the potential to provide a new way of using biometrics. It could enable biometrics to be used across borders, and at all airports, without the passenger’s details being stored by the various authorities. ShoCard has worked with us to demonstrate how we could make this a reality.”

The app is at its earlier stages and the representatives of SITA pointed to the project as a means to allow the company test the use of blockchain. Talking about the blockchain technology, ShoCard founder and CEO Armin Ebrahimi said that, “ShoCard sees a digital revolution when it comes to people providing their verifiable identity information to third parties.” Speaking to the conference, he said, “Today we are showing how our identity platform, built using the blockchain, combined with SITA’s unique air transport and border management solutions could improve traveler experience while ensuring security.”

SITA was founded 1949 and the company comprises of 417 international airline and aviation companies. Palo Alto-based ShoCard was founded by former Yahoo senior vice president Armin Ebrahimi and Jeff Weitzman who was the former president of Coupons.com. Last year, ShoCard raised $1.5 million in funding from Digital Currency Group and three other venture capital firms.