Digi Yatra Foundation Transforms Passenger Processes at Airports Across India with Digi Yatra Mobile App on AWS

India’s Digi Yatra Foundation (DYF) was founded in February 2019 with a clear mission: to give airline passengers a fully contactless, seamless process. “The airport boarding process can be frustrating and time consuming, with many checkpoints along the way,” says Suresh Khadakbhavi, CEO at Digi Yatra Foundation. “We wanted to provide air travelers an easy, ‘walk-in-the-park’ experience, from airport entry gates to the boarding gate.”

To this end, India’s Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) and DYF enacted the Digi Yatra policy, an initiative to adopt a biometric boarding system using single-token face biometrics. The Digi Yatra Central Ecosystem is based on World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards and Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). “The Ministry of Civil Aviation wanted us to create a new standard operating process for passengers at all airports across India,” Khadakbhavi says. “We decided that a privacy-preserving ecosystem with a mobile app-based enrolment deployed on the cloud would be the best solution.” Additionally, MoCA wanted DYF to develop the new solution as quickly as possible, so it could be rolled out at multiple airports.

DYF designed and developed the Digi Yatra mobile app on Amazon Web Services (AWS), using Amazon Cognito, a secure, frictionless customer identity and access management service that scales to authenticate passengers with an access token. This feature signs in users by sending them an SMS message through Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) with a one-time verification code. Following this step, passengers are required to utilize their Aadhaar, a 12-digit unique identification number, for an Aadhaar ID validation process. This can be done by using either direct Aadhaar validation or the Digi Locker Aadhaar e-Know Your Customer (KYC) document. Once the e-KYC document is received, the face biometric is extracted by the Digi Yatra App and the passenger is prompted to take and upload a selfie. This selfie image is matched with the e-KYC reference face, and the ID credentials are created. The sign-in process triggers functions on AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that manages generation and verification of the user’s verifiable credentials. Khadakbhavi states, “The system operates as a paperless, contactless solution, where the passenger's face effectively transforms into the boarding pass. The selfie serves as the single token throughout the entire boarding journey.”

The Digi Yatra app has a seamless API integration with Digi Locker to fetch the Aadhaar e-KYC data. All collected data is encrypted and securely stored on the passenger's smartphone in a wallet as verifiable credentials. Upon completing this step, travelers only need to upload their boarding pass, which can be done by scanning or uploading a PDF or image of the boarding pass. They can then share their ID and travel credentials with their departure airport. Once this process is completed, passengers receive an updated digital boarding pass on the home screen of the app, which is directly shared with the departure airport verifier node.

For regulatory reasons, passengers’ credentials are stored at the departure airport verifier node for a short period of time after the boarding process and flight departure. This data is purged from the system within 24 hours after flight departure. The Digi Yatra Central Ecosystem and the Digi Yatra apps are built on the fundamental tenets of “privacy by design” that empower passengers to take charge of their own personally identifiable information.