eIDAS and e-ID … and Building a More Trusted World … Go Be Crazy!
The ambitious nature of the EU to create a common marketplace is something that few countries in the world could ever attempt. It is a grand vision of harmonizing the legal and governance infrastructures that we have created over the centuries. At the core of this must be the transformation of traditional legal approaches to the trustworthiness of documents towards verifiable digital methods.
Identity
Lykidis et al [1] define a wide range of ongoing blockchain-based e-Government applications including Authentication, e-Voting, Land Property Services, e-Delivery Services, Human Resources Management, and Government Contracting. A part of these infrastructures is the integration of an identity infrastructure, and which can involve the generation of identities by a trusted authority, or where entities can control their own identity. The method of creating and controlling our own identity is known as SSI (Self-sovereign Identity). With this, we typically use a key pair, and where transactions are digitally signed using a private key, and then this is proven with a public key. The private key can then be stored in a citizen wallet, and which cannot be accessed by any other entity.
Two major global initiates which aim to harmonize the usage of verifiable credentials and wallets are…
