Place and identity

What this is

Every familiar sign-in factor is tied to a person or to their device: a password, a phone, a messenger, a key. None of them answers the question "is the person actually here?".

A place does. A QR printed on the office printer, or shown on a cheap panel in a shared area, exists only inside the room: scanning it means being there. The sign-in on the workstation carries the identity, the QR on site carries the presence. Together that is "place + identity" — two factors from genuinely different categories, rather than two apps on the very same phone.

The order of the steps depends on the surface. With a printer identity comes first: the employee starts the sign-in, the core prints the sheet, the person collects it and scans it. With a screen the order is reversed — scanning the panel in the shared area starts a transaction bound to that place, and it is completed later at the person's own desk.

A dedicated panel usually does not have to be bought at all: suitable screens are already hanging and standing in the office. The meeting-room TV used for presentations shows the QR to the whole room, large and readable from any seat. The desk IP phone is the more interesting one: there is one on every desk, current models have a colour screen able to display arbitrary content, and it is bound not to a shared area but to one particular workplace — so it pins the place down more precisely than a panel in the corridor. Both are attractive for the same reason as the printer: the hardware already stands in the room, is physically bound to it and never leaves it.

What it is for

• Signing in to an internal web system with proof of presence. A stolen password, or even a hijacked messenger, is not enough: access to the room is required as well.
• Offices where radio is forbidden by policy. Where Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are switched off, a whole class of competing proximity factors is unavailable — cross-device passkeys prove device proximity over BLE. A paper or on-screen QR needs no radio at all.
• Surfaces nothing can scan. A screen behind glass or in a rack, a projector, a headless panel on a shop floor: a sheet with the QR is printed and carried to where the screen is useless.
• Onboarding new employees. A sheet carrying the QR codes of several channels in the welcome pack — "scan it with whichever messenger you use" — links the channels without sitting at a computer.

Where the boundary runs

The place factor is exactly as strong as the physical access control of the room. Against a colleague in the same room it does not protect at all — they satisfy it trivially.

Printing adds risks of its own: a sheet outlives the session, it can be left in a shared tray, and a personalised onboarding sheet is a long-lived linking secret that a short TTL cannot cure. Without a single-use token, invalidation of the remaining QR codes on first use and an explicit lifetime for the sheet, such a scenario is not safe.

A QR on a permanent screen is visible to everyone in the room and to the cameras, so it can only ever be a marker of a place and never a secret: short TTL, rotation, and holding it grants nothing on its own.

Ready-made office hardware has limits of its own. A desk IP phone screen is small, and whether a readable QR fits on it depends on the model. And both the TV and the phone display foreign content only the way their vendor allows, so "show a QR" turns into an integration with a specific model — exactly the vendor specificity a dedicated panel avoids.

Where this stands

Neither a printer nor a screen is a Veriqa channel today: every existing channel is bound to a person, and a "place channel" is a new category in the channel model, common to both surfaces.

We are working on this: what works out will appear in releases as it is developed; if the direction does not hold up, this page will say so.