ANALYSIS OF THE mDOCUMENTS CONCEPT

The goal of the paper is to present an analysis related to an introduction of citizen identity verification mechanism based on the mobile phone. The analysis refers to the model published by the Ministry of Digitalization in The Description of an IT Project’s Design Brief “mDocuments in the Public Administration in Poland – Phase 1”. The model is based on personal data stored and processed by central registers. The article is based on the analyses of The Description of an IT Project’s Design Brief, the literature concerning the issue as well as publicly available data referring to the level of Poland’s digitalization. The analysis shows that using a mobile phone as an instrument of citizen identification is questionable and it has various drawbacks. The most important of them refer to insufficient confidence related to the correctness of a verified identity (resulting from lack of biometric tools), high risk of identity theft by phishing or phone theft, dependence of the identity verification process on the battery lifespan as well as GSM coverage. The article leads to the conclusion that one should consider possible ways of increasing the identification security in the prospective work on the idea of mDocuments. These ways include identification based on biometric tools and SMS encryption.