New eIDAS-Testbed runs first successful tests on European Digital Identity Wallet

The entourage forming around eIDAS continues to grow, as the EU regulation pushes Europe toward a digitized society activated through the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW) scheme. The non-profit go.eIDAS-Association, which aims at fostering interoperability and trust for digital identities, has partnered with a number of German tech firms and foundations to launch the eIDAS-Testbed. According to a news item on go.eIDAS’s website, the testbed “aims at fostering sovereignty, interoperability and trust for digital identities in Europe and beyond.

“In order to enable interoperability tests for issuing Personal Identification (PID)-Credentials to existing and forthcoming EUDIW, the go.eIDAS Association joined forces with selected partners in order to create the eIDAS-Testbed.”

At the heart of the eIDAS-Testbed is an issuer service, which “integrates with the existing eIDAS-Network and supports the necessary protocols and credential formats in order to issue PID-Credentials to Architecture and Reference Framework (ARF)-compliant wallets.”

At the recent OpenID-Wallet-Plugfest, part of the Tech-X Conference & Hackathon in Luxembourg, several wallets were tested with the eIDAS-Testbed using “Pre-Authorized Code Flow” in which user authentication and identification is performed before the EUDIW scans a QR code with a so called “Credential Offer,” which is then turned into a PID-Credential.

Tests revealed room for improvement on the question of interoperability. However, one wallet, from French firm Talao – which bills itself as “the first digital identity provider in Europe” –  demonstrated “compliance to the pertinent specifications.”

“It does not come as a surprise that Germany and France are playing a leading role in shaping the European Digital Identity Framework in order to provide a high level of sovereignty, trust and interoperability,” says Rafael Laguna de la Vera, director of Germany’s Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (SPRIND). “This is because Germany and France are convinced that the EU needs more innovation, more single market and more investment in sovereign and trustworthy technologies such as digital identities.”

The coalition behind the eIDAS-Testbed has plans to broaden the scope of its interoperability testing to include application-specific protocols and formats. Representatives from the healthcare and mobile digital ID sectors say it can help address crucial interoperability aspects of digital identity early in the process.

Interested public or private parties working in the digital identity, ID verification, digital wallet, trust service, compliance or regulatory sectors that “want to contribute to the development of a sovereign, trustworthy and interoperable European Digital Identity Framework and European Dataspace Ecosystem” can apply to join the go.eIDAS-Association.

More information, as well as the eIDAS-Association’s formal goals and principles, can be found here.

Article Topics

digital identity  |  digital wallets  |  eIDAS  |  EU  |  EU Digital Identity Wallet  |  European Digital Identity Framework  |  go.eIDAS  |  interoperability