What is the risk of storing MRZ/passport data, and how should it be secured?

Storing MRZ and passport data carries genuine risk, since this category of information, full name, date of birth, nationality, passport number, expiry date, and sometimes an address or additional personal identifiers, is highly sensitive and, if compromised, can enable identity theft, fraud, or unauthorized access to other systems that rely on the same identity data for verification.

Passport numbers specifically carry additional risk beyond typical personal data, since they're often used as a verification credential in their own right, matched against watchlists, used to confirm identity across multiple systems, or required for cross-border travel and various government processes. A breach exposing passport numbers alongside associated personal data gives an attacker a genuinely useful toolkit for impersonation or fraud across multiple contexts, not just within the original system where the breach occurred.

Securing this data properly generally involves several layered practices. Encryption, both in transit (using standard protocols like TLS during any transmission) and at rest (so stored data isn't readable even if underlying storage is somehow accessed without authorization), is a baseline requirement.

Access controls should restrict who within an organization can view or query stored passport data, following a principle of least privilege rather than broad, unrestricted internal access. Data minimization, storing only the fields genuinely necessary for a specific purpose rather than the complete extracted data set by default, reduces the scope of what's exposed in the event of any breach.

Retention limits, deleting or anonymizing data once it's no longer needed for its original purpose, similarly reduce the window of exposure and the total volume of sensitive data accumulated over time.

Regular security audits and appropriate certifications (like SOC 2 or ISO 27001, depending on a business's specific regulatory context) provide external validation that these practices are actually being followed, rather than relying solely on a vendor's own claims.

Given the sensitivity involved, businesses handling passport and MRZ data should treat it with security practices at least as rigorous as those applied to financial data, and should confirm directly with any document scanning vendor exactly what encryption, access control, and retention practices are in place before integrating.

ScanDoc encrypts data in transit and at rest, supports configurable field masking and retention limits, and can provide relevant security documentation and certifications to businesses evaluating its platform for handling passport and other sensitive identity document data.