Insurance claim photos, authenticated at the moment of capture by Europe's own navigation satellites

With AI-generated imagery, deepfakes, and trivial metadata manipulation now widely accessible, insurers receiving claim documentation face a fundamental question: can they trust what they see? Traditional approaches rely on detecting manipulation after the fact, forensic analysis, expert dispatch, manual review, all of which are slow, expensive, and increasingly ineffective as generative AI advances. The problem extends beyond deliberate fraud. Even legitimate claim photos taken by policyholders carry no reliable chain of custody. Was the photo taken at the scene? At the time of the incident? On the actual vehicle or property listed? These questions delay settlements, drive costly expert visits, and create friction for the honest majority while doing little to stop determined bad actors. Meanwhile, European regulation is tightening: the EU AI Act classifies insurance claim assessment as a high-risk AI use case, requiring verifiable, auditable inputs, which most insurers cannot yet provide. The industry needed a way to make every claim photo trustworthy from the moment it was taken, without adding friction for the person taking it.

E-Group developed AuthSurance under ESA Kick-Start contract CFP/5-50126, a six-month feasibility study that delivered a working end-to-end prototype. AuthSurance is the insurance vertical of E-Group's ProofX platform: a trust layer that turns a standard smartphone photo into a piece of legally defensible evidence. The authentication chain operates at three levels. Galileo OSNMA, Europe's satellite navigation authentication signal, operational since July 2025 and the first of its kind in civilian use globally anchors the photo to a verified time and place using satellite signals that are extraordinarily difficult to forge or replay. An eIDAS-compliant CAdES signature and/or a C2PA content provenance seal then binds the image itself to that anchor: any subsequent change to the photo, however subtle, becomes detectable. An optional third layer adds identity binding via eIDAS electronic identity, for scenarios where knowing who took the photo matters, KYC-regulated claims, cargo inspection, notarised assessments. The system degrades gracefully: when full OSNMA capture is not possible indoors, in dense urban environments, or on older devices it falls back to server-assisted verification or content-only sealing, and communicates the trust tier explicitly. There are four defined trust tiers, from cryptographically anchored moment-and-place capture down to tamper-evident content-only sealing, each explicitly communicated to the verifying party so assurance levels are never silently downgraded. The working prototype runs end-to-end on Android, integrating with an insurer's existing claim management system via a closed SDK designed to drop into any existing mobile application.

All ESA Kick-Start milestones were completed and formally accepted. The functional PoC+ demonstrates the full three-layer authentication chain on Android devices raw Galileo OSNMA signal capture, server-side key-chain reconstruction and verification, eIDAS CAdES sealing, and a claim management dashboard with per-claim trust-tier display. The system runs end-to-end in E-Group demo environments and is ready for pilot integration. The primary commercial value proposition validated during the project is operational efficiency: faster claim cycle times and fewer expert dispatches on the legitimate majority of claims, alongside a stronger audit trail for EU AI Act compliance at the input layer. The implementation roadmap runs in three phases: Motor and Agricultural insurance lines in production by Q2 2027; hybrid indoor extension and iOS support by Q3 2027; CEE roll-out targeting regional entities of multinational insurer groups from Q1 2028. Follow-on options with ESA for the demonstration project phase remain open alongside multiple EU co-funding paths including Horizon Europe and Digital Europe.