Moldova joins second round of EUDI pilot project

Moldova will participate in the second round of a pilot for the EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI).

The e-Governance Agency of Moldova (AGE) will be engaged in the Large-Scale Pilot Projects (LSP) for one of the EU’s most significant digital initiatives. AGE will be involved with the development and testing of secure Business-to-Government solutions to integrate digital wallets with public services across the EU.

AGE is a member of the WE BUILD consortium – that includes the likes of Veridas, Raidiam, Izertis and Youverse and nearly 200 other partners – which is instrumental in the second phase of the large-scale pilots for the EUDI.

Moldova already has a proto-version of the Digital Identity Wallet in the form of its “Documents” module in EVO, the country’s national public services app. Moldova is also testing EVOSign, an authentication tool, with plans to expand it into a full-fledged electronic signature application.

The LSP projects are funded by Digital Europe’s €7 billion budget while each EU member state will develop its own wallet application based on common specifications to ensure interoperability. The likes of Liechtenstein have aligned their digital ID with the EUDI Wallet, while Ukraine has tested compatibility with the EUDI Wallet.

Securing the European Digital Identity Wallets

GlobalPlatform has published a paper that presents two standardized and interoperable frameworks that solves challenges related to EUDI.

The challenges involved include ensuring a high security level for each member state’s wallet solution, while a transitional national security certification scheme will be needed to validate the wallets that meet the necessary security requirements.

Secure elements (SE) are widespread in smartphones and offer high levels of security and usability when deploying digital wallets to devices, with GlobalPlatform working to optimize scalability, according to the industry association.

The aforementioned frameworks are Secured Applications for Mobile (SAM), so member states can deploy and manage applications on embedded SE and embedded SIM across devices; and a Cryptographic Service Provider (CSP) to streamline the certification process.

The paper also sets out steps that GlobalPlatform believes the EU Commission, member states, wallet developers, LSPs, and smartphone manufacturers should take. “By taking these actions, each stakeholder group can make a significant contribution to ensure a secure, interoperable, and widely adopted digital identity solution across the European Union,” the association said.

The paper “Securing the European Digital Identity Wallets: Meeting the challenges of technology, sovereignty, and certification” can be downloaded here.

Digital wallets should be open source

So believes SpruceID.

The open-source evangelist for digital credentialing advocates for free and open source software (FOSS). “Open source can also provide substantive security and interoperability advantages to identity systems, particularly for digital wallets,” writes Libby Brown, senior product manager of SpruceID.

Regarding open-source, MOSIP is a major example and which has helped support digital identity efforts across Asia and beyond. SpruceID meanwhile is an active supporter of open source initiatives as a founding member of the Open Wallet Foundation and funds initiatives to support open source developers in the ecosystem.

“Open source licenses allow code to be freely modified, meaning a developer can borrow something close to what they’re trying to create and then add modifications specific to their goals, which may be quite different than the functionality of the library it’s built upon,” Brown writes. “This ‘building on the work of others’ can be particularly powerful for applications that run on open data standards, including digital credential wallets.”

Article Topics

digital ID  |  digital identity  |  digital wallets  |  EU Digital Identity Wallet  |  GlobalPlatform  |  interoperability  |  Moldova  |  open source  |  SpruceID  |  WE BUILD consortium