Apple Ships Driver's Licenses with a Privacy-centric Design

Apple now securely manages your driver's licenses in its phone vault. Not only that, they have figured out how to do this while preserving your privacy even when you have to show your proof of driver's license to a cop (or any validating entity).

Apple lays out the core privacy & security features in it's announcement:

Security and Privacy

Wallet provides a convenient and more secure way to present driver’s licenses and state IDs, while offering superior security and privacy over a physical wallet.

• Apple and the issuing states do not know when or where users present their IDs.
• Driver’s licenses and state IDs in Wallet take full advantage of the privacy and security built into iPhone and Apple Watch. Customers’ identity data is encrypted and protected against tampering and theft. Biometric authentication using Face ID and Touch ID ensures that only the person who added the ID to the device can view or present their ID or license in Wallet.
• Driver’s licenses and state IDs in Wallet are only presented digitally through encrypted communication directly between the device and the identity reader, so users do not need to unlock, show, or hand over their device.

Privacy by Design

When we started Skyflow, we were inspired by how Apple uses various privacy & security technologies to provide a beautiful and easy end user experience. This driver's license implementation is another example of:

• Zero Knowledge Proofs: Without decrypting all the data about your driver's license and exposing it to the cop/validating party, can you simply prove that you have a legitimate right to drive - an unexpired, valid license.
• Isolate & Protect: Apple uses the secure element on the phone to isolate and protect certain data elements and computation.
• Encryption & Tokenization: The data is not jus isolated, it's also always encrypted at rest and in motion.

You can read here the details of Apple's announcement and the various states that are initially rolling this out.

With it's core privacy & security platform - across the phone and the cloud - which took many years for Apple to build out, it has been shipping new features across categories that all rely on the same underlying zero-trust architecture.

1. Credit Cards
2. Boarding Passes
3. Health Records
4. Anonymous User Registration

At Skyflow, we believe that every company that needs personal sensitive information (PII) to serve the customer will have to build similar set of technologies - essentially, you have to either buy or build a zero-trust customer privacy data vault.