In 2023, Yubico began collaborating on an exciting open standards identity project – wwWallet – to shape the future of digital identity across Europe and beyond. The project saw immediate success solving problems for global identity, and was submitted in the German SPRIN-D European Digital Identity (EUDI) Funke competition which aims to develop and test technical solutions for future German and EUDI wallets in the form of prototypes. Now, we’re excited to share that Yubico – along with our partners from the Greek Universities Network (GUnet) and Swedish University Computer Network (SUNET) – have been selected as finalists to help show how to secure the German government’s digital identity program.
Traditional federated authentication – where cloud-based identity providers serve as a centralized system for users to access online services is widely adopted – results in the control being in the hands of the providers. In contrast, EUDI wallets offer a decentralized approach that empowers users to control when, where and how much of their personal data is shared, as well as with whom. The project, spearheaded by contributions from GUnet, SUNET, and Yubico, supports passkeys in YubiKeys for logging into and encrypting the wallet. This project highlights the potential of FIDO-based authentication in seamlessly integrating digital wallets worldwide to establish secure and verifiable identity credentials.
John Bradley, distinguished architect at Yubico, has worked closely spearheading the wwWallet project and its progression in the competition: “The open standards nature of the wwWallet project is making interoperable and safe solutions for all users – all backed by the phishing-resistant, hardware-based security of YubiKeys which gives the ability to seamlessly use digital identity wallets in the ways that matter most.”
For this competition, the wallet has demonstrated provisioning of credentials from the German national eID (the Neue Personalausweis Smart Card) and real-world use cases which have been tested together with relying parties from a large-scale pilot. With the EUDI wallet, citizens will be able to identify themselves digitally and also be able to store, manage, and present their identity attributes from official documents in electronic form using these digital wallets.
Yubico is proud of everything done to this point including the tremendous work by the members of Yubico’s engineering, standards and developer program teams, and we look forward to the impact wwWallet’s innovations can have on global digital identity in the future.
For more information on the Funke Innovation competition, visit the SPRIN-D site here or watch our demo video of the wwWallet project below.
