Secure Identity Alliance unveils new OSIA digital ID compliance program at ID4Africa

The Secure Identity Alliance (SIA) unveiled a new digital infrastructure initiative at the ID4Africa 2022 Augmented General Meeting to help governments choose biometrics and other technologies for their digital identity initiatives.

The open standards and open APIs (OSIA) Qualification Program was created to help digital identity technology vendors achieve compliance with the OSIA specifications to meet prerequisites in tendering processes.

From a technical standpoint, the goal of SIA’s OSIA initiative is to eliminate vendor lock-in and make interoperability for sovereign identity programs possible via a set of open standard interfaces that are independent of technology, solution architecture, or vendor.

“The importance of openness and interoperability within the identity ecosystem cannot be underestimated,” comments SIA’s Chairman Matthew Cole.

“Not only does this drive product and solution innovation, [but it also] enables governments to confidently invest in the future-proofed national identity schemes that underpin social and economic development.”

The OSIA test plan was developed by SIA in collaboration with digital payment expert Fime. It comes months after Secure Identity Alliance partnered with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) to collaborate on ‘privacy by design’ principles and embed them in OSIA-based systems.

According to the OSIA Qualification Program, interested vendors will be assessed by the standard certification organization GlobalPlatform, which will issue the ‘OSIA-qualified’ mark to them after the successful assessment of their products/solutions.

“Creating trusted digital identities has become a critical priority to support a broad range of use cases, enabled by the growing number of connected devices,” explains GlobalPlatform Executive Director Ana Tavares Lattibeaudiere.

“GlobalPlatform is proud to bring its 15 years of experience in qualification to support SIA with this important initiative to bring interoperability and ensure digital IDs can be accepted with confidence,” she adds.

For additional reporting on ID4Africa 2022, you can follow our dedicated coverage here.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  certification  |  digital identity  |  Fime  |  ID4Africa  |  ID4Africa 2022  |  interoperability  |  OSIA (Open Standards Identity API)  |  Secure Identity Alliance  |  standards  |  vendor lock-in