On March 9, The Vienna Digital Identity Meetup* hosted presentations from Xavier Vila, Product Manager for Validated ID and Dr. Ignacio Alamillo, Director of Astrea on eIDAS and Self Sovereign Identity. The presentations covered the technical, legal and business dimensions of bridging between eIDAS and SSI concepts and increasing the value and usability of digital identity in the European model.

A key component of the Digital Europe architecture is the existence of a trusted and secure digital identity infrastructure. This journey was started in 2014 with the implementation of the eIDAS Regulation. As has been discussed in previous Vienna Digital Identity Meetups, a high assurance digital identity is the key piece connecting the physical and digital worlds, and this piece was not included in the initial creation of our digital world.

Why then is eIDAS v1 not seen as a success? There are many reasons; from parts of the regulation that focused or constrained its use into the public sphere only, to the lack of total coverage across all of the EU. Likely the key missing piece was that the cultural climate was not yet ripe and the state of digital identity was really not ready. Too many technical problems were yet to be solved. Without these elements the realized state of eIDAS should not be unexpected. All this said, eIDAS v1 laid very important groundwork and created an environment to gather important learnings to allow eIDAS v2 to realize the hoped for levels of success and adoption.

Validated ID has been developing a eIDAS - ESSIF bridge bringing the eIDAS trust seals to Verifiable Credentials. As a Qualified Trust Service Provider under the eIDAS, Validated ID has been offering trust services to customers across Europe since 2012. Xavier presented this current work and provides a detailed explanation on how the eIDAS-SSI bridge applies the qualified electronic seals to Verifiable Credentials.

Dr. Alamillo further clarified the importance of the eIDAS-SSI Bridge in his presentation on SSI in the eIDAS Regulation. When a Qualified Electronic Seal is applied to a Verifiable Credential the combined document becomes a legal document with cross border legal value within the EU. Currently in an identity context, eIDAS is the European wide identity meta system, providing the framework for the 27 nation states of the EU to operate as a very large federated identity network. However, the point was raised the in the current ongoing revision of the eIDAS regulation, it is possible that handling of electronic identification may be changed from a ‘connecting of services’ to a new trust service.

To listen to a recording of the event please check out the link: https://vimeo.com/522501200

Time markers:

• 0:00:00 - Introduction


• 0:04:00 - Xavier Vila, Validated ID


• 0:34:00 - Questions


• 0:42:00 - Dr. Ignacio Alamillo, Astrea


• 1:18:00 - Questions


• 1:28:00 - Wrap-up & Upcoming Events



Resources

SSI - eIDAS Bridge GitHub Repo - https://github.com/validatedid/ssi-eidas-bridge/

Xavier Vila’s Presentation Deck: Vale-SSI-EIDAS Bridge.pdf
Nacho Alamillo’s Presentation Deck: Alamillo-SSI-EIDAS.pdf

And as a reminder, we continue to have online only events.

If interested in getting notifications of upcoming events please join the event group at: https://www.meetup.com/Vienna-Digital-Identity-Meetup/

*The Vienna Digital Identity Meetup is hosted by The Dingle Group and is focused on educating business, societal, legal and technologists on the new opportunities that arise with a high assurance digital identity created by the reduction risk and strengthened provenance. We meet on the 4th Monday of every month, in person (when permitted) in Vienna and online on Zoom. Connecting and educating across borders and oceans.