From 22 to 24 September 2026, SafeTravellers holds the second and final phase of its airport pilot demonstration at the Academy of the Police Force in Bratislava, hosted by the Bureau of Border and Foreign Police of the Slovak Ministry of Interior. Over three days, border guards, law enforcement officers and technical partners assess the robustness of the project’s identity-verification tools against deliberate attacks under operational conditions.
Airports were the first environment in which biometric border checks were deployed at scale, and remain the most exposed to attempts to defeat them. Participants work through a defined set of scenarios at a simulated airport checkpoint, covering passenger enrolment, identity verification, and attacks directed at the biometric capture devices and the samples they collect: morphing, presentation, manipulation, mimic, look-alike, make-up and hardware attacks. Each run is logged and measured against the project’s key performance indicators.
Phase 1 validated the initial version of the tools and collected structured feedback from practitioners, which has since been incorporated into the system. Phase 2 assesses the revised version and establishes its accuracy in a realistic operational setting.
Bratislava closes the SafeTravellers validation campaign. It follows the railway pilot in Paris on 11 June 2026, hosted by UIC, which tested identity checks in passenger halls and multi-modal hubs, and the maritime and land border scenarios demonstrated in Constanța in July 2026, hosted by the Romanian Border Police, where the focus was on fraudulent identity and travel documents.
Each pilot examined a different border environment with a different set of practitioners. Taken together, the four campaigns tell the project what transfers between transport modes and what has to be adapted for each.
The findings from Bratislava feed into the final assessment of the SafeTravellers framework, along with the lessons learned, recommendations and training material the consortium will publish as the project closes in December 2026.
The demonstration is a consortium activity, held by invitation. Participants include border guards and law enforcement officers responsible for identity and travel document checks, the technical partners operating the tools, and volunteers acting as travellers.
SafeTravellers Airport Pilot Demonstration — Pilot 1, Phase 2
