What’s in a digital ID wallet?

What is a digital identity wallet? While they have been used for some years and have been included in some of the most important policy documents across the globe, there seems to be as many definitions of digital ID wallets as there are approaches to creating them.

At this year’s Authenticate Conference, hosted by the FIDO Alliance, representatives from Idemia, 1Kosmos, Uniken and Spherical Cow Consulting examined underlying assumptions behind digital ID wallets in different areas of the world — from the EU Digital Identity Wallet to mobile driving licenses in the U.S. and everything in between.

For some, a digital ID wallet is created by a government agency to allow citizens to keep their identity in a cryptographically secure framework. It’s not necessarily a mobile app – it can be a smart card. For others, it’s a group of generally verifiable attributes in a cryptographic container that is built to defined standards. And some define it as a new form of identity data delivery mechanism for businesses, focusing more on data and standards and less on orchestration and policy.

“There is no technical specification for a wallet, says Heather Flanagan, principal at Spherical Cow Consulting. “There are lots of specifications for credentials that go in the wallet, and there are lots of pilots and efforts and frameworks and regulations.”

One of the ways of understanding wallets could be by looking at the standards behind them. While some countries have opted to come out with draft specifications on which prototypes are built, others are approaching them from a different mindset and letting the market decide on the right solution.

Digital ID wallet standards are often not technical specifications in the same way many think of standards. The Open Wallet Foundation, for instance, has been doing work on development tools, while the EU has been building up the Architecture Reference Framework.

“There is standard work being done on the credential level, and oftentimes, maybe the wallet, the container of these credentials, is not as important,” says Theresa Wu, vice president of smart credentials at Idemia.

A lot of the development of digital ID wallets is happening in localized formats. It is important to go beyond the U.S.-centric perspective on how wallets should work and have a global perspective, says Nishant Kaushik, chief technology officer at Uniken.

The “fuzziness” in defining digital ID wallets gets even more interesting when we consider that they will become a piece of infrastructure that is going to handle personal data. Huge amounts of effort and discussions are going into global interoperability and cross-border use cases.

In the end, however, most users don’t care about how digital ID wallets are made, they just want them to work. Operators still need to solve many practical challenges around availability and accessibility and account recovery, the panel said.

Article Topics

Authenticate Conference  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  digital wallets  |  FIDO Alliance  |  interoperability  |  standards