WSO2 to help MOSIP’s passwordless authentication platform eSignet Go Thunder

IIIT-Bangalore, home to India’s burgeoning digital public goods efforts, has formed a partnership through the MOSIP initiative it hosts with Sri Lanka-based global identity and access management (IAM) giant WSO2 to collaborate on the development of single sign-on (SSO) and identity verification platform eSignet.

The goal is to strengthen eSignet’s security, enhance its features and ease its scalability for global deployment, according to an announcement from the partners.

WSO2 Founder and CEO Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana described his company to Biometric Update in an interview on the sidelines of MOSIP Connect 2026 as an open-source enterprise middleware company.

MOSIP launched eSignet in 2023 to enable passwordless authentication to a range of digital platforms and services.

WSO2’s portfolio includes software for identity management, API management, integration, agent management and development platforms. It has customers 90-plus countries, including Fidelity, Bank of New York and Hilton. Its technology is used by UAE Pass and digital ID systems in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Weerawarana says, plus other government systems from Sri Lanka to Moldova, Tonga to Nigeria. For every paying customer it has “easily a hundred” using it for free.

This expertise will be combined with IIT-B’s academic and research insight into digital public infrastructure (DPI) and open standards. Specifically, the partners intend to modernize the code base for eSignet, as software development moves from Java to Go. Building up the community of developers around eSignet and providing technical guidance and support for its implementation are also parts of the collaboration.

“We are delighted to join forces with WSO2, a company with a proven track record in open-source identity solutions,” says Prof. S. Rajagopalan, president of the MOSIP program, in the announcement. “This collaboration is a significant step in strengthening eSignet’s technological foundation and ensuring its readiness to be a cornerstone of secure, open, and inclusive digital identity systems worldwide.”

WSO2 brings the Thunder

As a private company providing an open-source platform for identity management tools, WSO2 has the kind of major market footprint MOSIP is working towards, with customers in practically every vertical.

“We are a horizontal infrastructure provider,” Weerawarana explains. “The problems of identity management, API management, integration, are not verticalized to an industry.”

“We don’t build the software.  We are building the tools,” he adds.

WSO2 Identity Server is actually a competitor to eSignet, and like MOSIP’s platform, originally written in Java. As an infrastructure provider for the world, he says, WSO2 has to evolve and last, which means moving to Go Thunder. Thunder-based WSO2 Identity Server will come out in Q2 or early Q3.

But Weerawarana is also on MOSIP technical committee, and wants to help MOSIP likewise keep up with industry change.

He says Java Spring, which MOSIP wrote eSignet in, is “mature, let’s call it. So they’ve been through an evaluation process and they agreed that the next version of eSignet should be built on Thunder. So it’s not a contribution, as such. It is a rebasing of eSignet on a different base. And we will collaborate on building the base from now on.”

MOSIP has assigned some of its own developers to the task. eSignet 2.0 will be based on Thunder, but the time frame, Weerawarana says, is up to MOSIP.

The change should be invisible to users, and WSO2 and MOSIP are currently looking into how to migrate the systems and what it means to the developer community.

Article Topics

digital identity  |  digital public infrastructure  |  e-Signet  |  MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform)  |  MOSIP Connect 2026  |  open source  |  open standards  |  WSO2