CertifyMeAP

Professional Training Certificate at the Portuguese Public Administration: security, availability and reliability

The INA (National Institute of Administration I.P.) is the public sector entity that has the prerogative of coordinating the information on Professional Training, with a special focus on training for Public Administration (AP) workers.

The training courses provided by INA are of great importance for AP’s technical staff and senior management, which is why Professional Training Certificates are desired and, potentially, highly falsified elements. INA currently issues paper certificates with a classic security level, with room for improvement. This project aims to solve three main vectors: security, reliability and availability. On the one hand, the security of Certificates can be improved to a very high level and their contents comply with strict criteria that allow the integrity of their content to be verified [security and reliability]. On the other hand, it is intended that Certificates can take a qualitative leap in terms of ease and convenience of access, making them digital, through a digital twin, and with a more qualified digital management system and to which several digital layers can be added [availability].

When it comes to digital layers, one of the most important aspects of Certificates is the possibility of them being digitally signed, with digital verification, but also on printed documents, making the signature verifiable, but invisible (implementing printer-proof steganography technologies, also developed by the ISR-Coimbra team). Finally, the creation of a digital twin, allowing in some cases its total, or almost total, dematerialization, may also allow adding layers of related services. The Certificate can be made available by INA through an online platform with an access code (for instance, following the model of the permanent online records of the Institute of Registries and Notaries – IRN).

The use of AI is intrinsically related to the project’s main scientific challenges. On the one hand, the integration of the physical elements of the Certificates, detected and validated through a mobile device with a camera, brings demanding challenges in terms of Computer Vision algorithms. The solution will largely be achieved through the use of Deep Learning. On the other hand, the digital layers related to signatures with asymmetric encryption, related to natural language processing with large language models, bring great challenges to the project whose solution is also achieved through artificial intelligence (note that one of the requisites is to secure the whole textual information of the Certificates).

— The idea of the project is to build a proof of concept for both the physical certificate and its digital twin. INA is the Coordinating Entity for Professional Training in AP and ISR-Coimbra is the R&D entity to create and produce the physical certificates and host the digital certificates, in a proof-of-concept test. The central management system will also be hosted at ISR-Coimbra whereas the content management will be carried out by INA. The objective is to achieve a definition of the global architecture of the solution and a proof of concept with simulated data.

— The role of INA and ISR-Coimbra INA, as the coordinating entity of Professional Training for AP, will have a role in supporting the design of the solution and providing relevant data for the implementation of the technology. Its support for the project will be materialized in a series of meetings to define both the certificates and the overall solution. The design of the physical and digital properties of Certificates and digital twins, the definition of storage models and models for making them available to citizens and the proof of concept of Professional Training Certificates will be the responsibility of ISR-Coimbra, as well as research scientific algorithms, the construction of the logical system to demonstrate the proof of concept, and the construction of a mobile phone application that allows the Certificates to be validated.

DOI: https://sciproj.ptcris.pt/en/176765PRJ