Digital identity: how to ensure transatlantic use cases?

Digital identity and emerging standards

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The Europe and the US have both planned a massive roll out of digital identity standards. The Europe aims to provide access to digital identities to all citizens by 2030 as part of the digital decade program (1). Under the digital services act, public and private services (such as Amazon, Booking or Facebook) would have to accept the EU digital wallet for logging. The EU digital wallet also permits user to manage bank account and perform payment. Cross Atlantic the US has added into the National Cyber security Strategy the objective to support the development of a digital identity ecosystem (2). The US aims to reduce the flourishing fraud, improve inclusion and equity and provide a sustainable protection for US citizens.

The EU digital identity solution ensures cross border use cases within the members states (3). The EU wallet would allow citizens to provide identity attribute, to access services without revealing full identity and personal details. In the US all the federal agencies across the United States shall follow the digital identity standards (4).

How to ensure transatlantic interoperability?

The EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) established in 2021 aims to coordinate technology and trade policy between the United States and European Union (5). The technology standards working group (WG1) has been created within the TTC to develop approaches for coordination and cooperation in critical and emerging technology standards (6). Within this working group a subgroup has been created especially to tackle digital identity emerging standards. The first task has been to map the standards and approaches in order to streamline implementation guidance for a transatlantic pre-standardization effort (7).

The preliminary report includes mapping of definition, assurance levels and references to international standards. According to this study there is no major concepts that do not map to a companion concept. It is reassuring for future cross border use case development. The full mapping can be viewed on a public google spreadsheet (8) or in official draft report (7).

Hereafter some takeaways

?Next steps on cross border use cases

?The working group is keen to gather feedback from stakeholders is order to prepare future collaborative work to enable cross border uses case such as

• Travel:? interoperable digital identity mechanism will facilitate global movement of people between US and EU.
• Finance: interoperable digital identity mechanism will improve international trade management. It will increase efficiency and improve fraud management to name a few
• Healthcare: interoperable digital identity mechanism will lead to a better medical support with enabling a more efficient health records access. It will broaden medical options with a secure and an efficient mobility.
• Education and professional credentials: interoperable digital identity mechanism will facilitate credential verification and recognition. It will ease for administrative transfer or research collaboration.

TTC is expecting feedbacks to prepare the future and identify challenges. Most important topics concern

• Accessibility and inclusion (see also 10 and 11)
• Data control and privacy
• Certification approach
• Key trends to anticipate the future evolution
• Identify use cases and channels (device, offline, online…)
• State of the art and future proof security mechanism (see? also 12 and 13)

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What about other collaborations?

• ?Europe and China initiated discussion around potential alignment (14) on digitalization
• Europe and Africa synergies for the Next Generation Internet with a focus on digital identity and privacy (15).
• Partnership between EU and Singapore to improve digital trust (16).
• More globally the Europe is keen to find partnership in order to become a digitally connected continent by 2030 according to the Digital Compass Strategy (17).

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The world is undoubtedly moving towards a new globalization based on digital trust and the interoperability of use cases.

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Stay tune!

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?#Fime #DigitalIdentity #Trends

Sources

1.??? https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_5651

2.??? https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/National-Cybersecurity-Strategy-2023.pdf

3.??? https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/european-digital-identity_en

4.??? https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63-3.html

5.??? https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/stronger-europe-world/eu-us-trade-and-technology-council_en

6.??? https://futurium.ec.europa.eu/en/EU-US-TTC/wg1

7.??? https://futurium.ec.europa.eu/en/EU-US-TTC/news/eu-us-ttc-digital-identity-mapping-exercise-report

8.??? https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vS6PNo1dIXQPs50DbOK6xC3-jf1qTx0DwOf44mdLN4Mwetm1kF2U0D1Yto7wPiSug/pubhtml

9.??? https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=OJ%3AJOL_2015_235_R_0002

10.? https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1202

11.? https://www.ada.gov/

12.? https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2022/07/nist-announces-first-four-quantum-resistant-cryptographic-algorithms

13.? https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/horizon-cl3-2024-cs-01-02

14.? https://www.eias.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Policy-Brief-5G_Mogni_Goethals_EU-CN-Dialogue-Digitalization.pdf

15.? https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/events/future-digital-identity-exploring-policy-and-technical-innovations-europe-and-africa

16.? https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_467

17.? https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/partnerships