UIDAI launches SITAA initiative to build digital solutions

• The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has launched the Scheme for Innovation and Technology Association with Aadhaar (SITAA) to foster innovation and collaboration in the digital identity domain. 

• The initiative aims to strengthen India’s ID Tech ecosystem by enabling startups, academia, and industry to work closely with UIDAI. 

• Through this project, UIDAI seeks to drive innovation, promote indigenisation, and co-develop advanced and future-ready identity technologies.

• The initiative will be a catalyst for collaboration, enabling the innovation ecosystem to build scalable, secure, and globally benchmarked solutions in the digital identity domain.

• The focus areas, among many, include biometric devices, authentication frameworks, data privacy, artificial intelligence (AI) and secure identity applications.

• To begin with, MeitY Startup Hub (MSH) and NASSCOM have signed MoU with UIDAI and would act as strategic partners for furtherance of SITAA objectives. 

• MSH provides technical mentoring, incubation, and accelerator support, while NASSCOM offers industry connections, global outreach, and entrepreneurial support.

• Startups, academic institutions, and industry partners have the opportunity to contribute to building a future-ready, self-reliant digital identity ecosystem.

• This program will be kick-started through a pilot with few initial challenges specifically suitable for academic institutions, startups, industry partners. 

• The challenge includes invitation to startups to develop Software Development Kits (SDKs) for face-liveness detection using passive and active methods. 

• Solutions must prevent spoofing attacks (photos, videos, masks, morphs, deepfakes, adversarial inputs), work across UIDAI’s enrollment and authentication systems, ensure robustness across demographics, devices, and environments, support edge and server deployment, and minimize user friction through passive-first liveness.

• The SITAA pilot opens the door for innovators to translate ideas into practical solutions that enhance the security, reliability, and efficiency of India’s digital identity framework. 

• By encouraging cutting-edge research and technology development, the program positions India at the forefront of global identity innovation. 

What is deepfake?

• Manipulation of images is not new. But over recent decades digital recording and editing techniques have made it far easier to produce fake visual and audio content, not just of humans but also of animals, machines and even inanimate objects. 

• Deepfakes are a particularly concerning type of synthetic media that utilises AI to create believable and highly realistic media.

• A deepfake is a digital photo, video or sound file of a real person that has been edited to create an extremely realistic but false depiction of them doing or saying something that they did not actually do or say.

• A deepfake is a digital forgery created through “deep learning” (a subset of AI).

• Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have taken the technology even further, allowing it to rapidly generate content that is extremely realistic, almost impossible to detect with the naked eye and difficult to debunk. 

• The term “deepfakes” is derived from the fact that the technology involved in creating this particular style of manipulated content (or fakes) involves the use of deep learning techniques. Deep learning represents a subset of machine learning techniques which are themselves a subset of artificial intelligence.

• One of the most common techniques for creating deepfakes is the face swap. There are many applications that allow a user to swap faces.

• Another deepfake technique is “lip syncing”. It involves mapping a voice recording from one or multiple contexts to a video recording in another, to make the subject of the video appear to say something authentic. Lip synching technology allows the user to make their target say anything they want.

• Another technique allows for the creation of “puppet-master” deepfakes, in which one person’s (the master’s) facial expression and head movements are mapped onto another person (the puppet).

(The author is a trainer for Civil Services aspirants.)