Over the last several years, passkeys have become ubiquitous. They are available on every mobile platform, in every leading browser, as part of all major enterprise IAM solutions, and in most major cloud services. Until wwWallet came along, the only place where passkeys hadn’t yet made an impact is in the rapidly developing world of digital identity wallets. In early 2024, Yubico and European research and network organizations, Sunet, GUNet, and SURF developed wwWallet – the first Passkey-enabled digital identity wallet for the web.
This open-source project puts passkeys front and center in the evolving world of digital credentials and digital identity wallets. Passkeys will be used to authenticate into identity wallets, decrypt the credential store, and sign the presentations of verifiable credentials. Using passkeys will enable the best user experience, the best security, with the highest level of privacy – and at the lowest cost of total ownership for the new global digital identity ecosystem.
Over the past few months, this project has emerged as the leading, most tested, and interoperable identity solution among the EU Large Scale Digital Identity Wallet Pilot Programs. wwWallet has been recognized as one of the winners in the Funke competition, led by SPRIN-D – the German government agency driving ideas and innovation for Germany’s next national ID system. It has also garnered attention in many countries beyond Europe.
To accelerate our work, in December 2024, I initiated the formation of the SIROS Foundation as a standalone organization with the goal to fuel the wwWallet project with additional resources, funding, technical infrastructure, and governance. In February of this year, all the necessary paperwork was in place and we began hiring developers and other staff. This coming November, SIROS plans to launch a hosting platform for wwWallet under the name SIROS ID.
In collaboration with the next wave of EU Large Scale Pilot programs, SIROS is advancing wwWallet within the EU Large Scale pilot projects WE BUILD and Aptitude. In these pilots, SIROS plans to provide testbeds based on wwWallet to facilitate interoperability for wallets across borders. Additionally, we will demonstrate student and professional mobility between France and Canada in cooperation with regional governments in France and Quebec. It will also work with testing interoperability between Singapore and Sweden in the realm of business wallets and wallets for legal entities.
In close collaboration with Yubico, SIROS is piloting the solution as a digital press pass for OCCRP, a network of over 1,000 investigative journalists, and are conducting another pilot in collaboration with the STM association – the organization of international scholarly publishers. YubiKeys, the hardware passkeys from Yubico, will be included in all these pilots to meet the highest level of security and privacy and cover the widest range of use cases.
Together with the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), known for their Let’s Encrypt service, we are pursuing a number of research activities related to digital credentials including a clean-room implementation that will support Google’s zero-knowledge proposal “longfellow.”
SIROS will be piloting the Yubico-backed open contributions to the WebAuthn standard, which enable passkeys to provide eIDAS-compliant security for credentials stored in digital identity wallets. Yubico is also piloting hardware support for ‘zero-knowledge’ proof technology in a future firmware release of the YubiKey. Together with wwWallet, this offers an innovative and privacy-preserving approach to managing digital credentials.
Passkeys are unlocking the next frontier in digital identity. SIROS is building a global community of thought leaders driving the evolution of digital trust. As part of this network, Yubico, a pioneer in modern authentication and trusted security innovator, is expanding to provide broader digital identity solutions. Together, SIROS and Yubico are shaping the secure, interoperable, and privacy preserving solutions that will power the digital wallets and identity ecosystems of the future.
- Learn more about wwWallet on GitHub
- More on SIROS Foundation at SIROS.org
