Canada’s IDLab recommends ‘registry of registries’ to clarify foreign ID checks

The Digital Identity Laboratory of Canada (IDLab) has released a comprehensive final report on the Pan-Canadian Trust Registry from its community of practice, as part of the collaborative effort to establish trust registries, grow the adoption of trusted decentralized digital ID credentials, and strengthen Canadians’ general trust in online activities.

In a release, Jacques Latour, chief technology and security officer at the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), which sponsored the report, says trust registries are a crucial risk mitigation tool that can reliably confirm which entities issuing digital credentials are legitimate. In turn, says Latour, this deters malicious actors from attempting digital identity theft and other types of ID fraud, such as the theft of biometric data.

“The anticipated emergence of multiple trust registries, each with distinct scopes and governing authority, presents a new challenge,” reads the report. “Navigating this landscape requires mechanisms for the discovery of the appropriate trust registry to confirm the legitimacy of the credential issuer, including across international boundaries.”

In other words, explains IDLab VP of Program Delivery and Government Relations Cosanna Preston-Idedia, a registry of registries would make it easier for someone using a Nunavut driver’s license to prove their age at a gas station in rural Tennessee – where such licenses don’t show up very often – without any doubt or confusion about the document’s authenticity.

Or, in an example from the report, “how does an employer in Europe know that the diploma that a Canadian prospective employee is presenting from a small polytechnic institute in Canada can be trusted?”

The report’s answer is a “pan-Canadian registry of trust registries” that would leverage the Domain Name System (DNS) to make international ID checks simpler, more efficient, and more certain. To get there, IDLab presents two potential paths forward for CIRA’s plan: first, build a prototype that tests the viability of a registry model based on DNS; and second, leverage IDLabs’ co-created project program, which prioritizes design thinking, to “deepen the exploration of the problem.”

“The two proposed paths forward exemplify harnessing innovation from a community towards positioning Canada as a global leader in digital trust,” says the report in its conclusion. “Empowering individuals, verifiers and ecosystem actors to confirm the authenticity of their credentials, and enabling them to exert greater control over their digital identity, is a crucial step in the evolution of a trusted digital ecosystem.”

Article Topics

Canada  |  digital ID  |  document verification  |  identity verification  |  IDLab  |  trust framework