Identosphere 230: June 1-20 Part 2 General SSI round up.
No Phone Home Announcement Posts
Kaliya’s Response No Phone Home: What it means and why it is important
Timothy Ruff Phone Home is Bad. Really Bad.
Timonthy Ruff NoPhoneHome is Working, But Don’t Stop Now…
Phil Windley Let's Stop Phoning Home
I Comply: Centralized Digital Identity and ID “Phone Home” Privacy Alarms
Kim Hamilton Duffy Is Server Retrieval Actually Optional? The Investigation That Revealed More Problems
Even the Experts Didn't Know: How a Simple Presentation Revealed mDL's Latent Surveillance Problem
Responses from the mDL/mDOC community
mDL Privacy: Annex E of ISO/IEC 18013–5:2021
Annex E of ISO/IEC 18013–5 provides informative guidance on privacy and security recommendations for mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs). It tries to ensure the secure and privacy-preserving design and implementation of mDL solutions.
Digital Commons
Building a Digital Commons for Identity – the SIDIHub
At this year’s Identiverse conference, the OpenID Foundation and SIDI Hub were proud to present: "Building a Digital Commons for Identity.” The session outlined what has been achieved so far by the Sustainable and Interoperable Digital Identity Hub project (SIDI Hub) - a global initiative dedicated to advancing safe, interoperable digital identity systems.
Country News
Metadium Developer Joins the Digital Identity Technology Standard Forum(DITS) to Advance Korea’s DID Standardization and Ecosystem
We are pleased to announce that CPLABS, the developer of the Metadium mainnet and a leader in Decentralized Identity (DID) technology, has officially joined the Digital Identity Technology Standard Forum (DITSF) — Korea’s core consortium for digital identity standardization.
UK Digital ID Wallet: Opportunity, Threat… or Both?
Recently, the Data Protection and Digital Information (DPDI) Bill passed through the House of Lords in the United Kingdom.
This bill lays the legal foundation for the country’s Digital Identity Trust Framework and paves the way for the rollout of a UK digital ID wallet and mobile driving licences.
How Samsung Plans to Accelerate Digital ID Adoption in the U.S
In one of our latest podcast episodes, we were joined by Rob White, Head of Identity Services at Samsung Wallet, for an in-depth conversation about the future of mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) and digital identity.
Digital Public Infrastructure: The Invisible Foundation for New Zealand's Digital Future
Minister for Digitising Government, Hon Judith Collins KC, set the tone positioning digital transformation as central to improving New Zealanders' experience of government.
"New Zealanders increasingly choose to engage with government digitally," Collins explained. "We pay our bills, manage our taxes and look after our health through computers and phones. We're on the cusp of a digital revolution, and we need to fundamentally transform how we provide services, the quality of those services, and the cost of those services to New Zealanders."
Indicio to help develop digital travel credential in European Union digital wallet trial
Indicio, through its partnership with SITA, will participate in the European Union’s APTITUDE Consortium to develop digital travel credentials for the EU Digital Identity Wallet. Indicio and SITA developed the world’s first Digital Passport Credential based on International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standards for Digital Travel Credentials and successfully combined it with digital credentials following European Union digital identity specifications for seamless international travel.
Travel
[Indicio] Signs of the times: Apple Wallet Opens to Digital Credentials for Travel
Airlines Don't Want You to Know They Sold Your Flight Data to DHS
This is another example of how the US government bypasses certain Constitutional protections by simply buying the data they seek. ICE separately purchases data from this broker.
From the Ending Surveillance Capitalism Dept.
Did tracking-based advertising just get blown up in Europe?
As I read it (in an English translation here), an appeals court in Brussels ruled consent notifications on websites illegal (or close enough) in the EU.
How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance
"If you're going to join any protests, as is your right under the First Amendment, you need to think beyond your physical well-being to your digital security, too. The same surveillance apparatus that’s enabling the Trump administration’s raids of undocumented people and targeting of left-leaning activists will no doubt be out in full force on the streets."
WorldCoin Watch
The Orb / Tools for humanity / Worldcoin in 5 min
But what it actually does and how it works is remarkably hard to find out. In a recent podcast, the team behind the project took more than two hours to explain it, and that was only the highlights with no detail. No wonder theories are all over the place.
Educational Credentials
(Spruce ID) Rethinking Learner and Earner Credential Verification
(Velocity) Reinventing How Career Records Are Shared
Adding Credly Badges to the Learner Credential Wallet: Making Open Badges Portable Again
(Anonyome Labs) How universities can boost graduate employability with verifiable credentials
(Extrimian) Diploma & Credential Verification in Education
(Dhiway) What It Took to Deliver Exam Results to 3.1 Million Students
Pilot News
moveID: Wrapping Up Three Years of Mobility Innovation
After three years of intense collaboration, innovation, and field testing, the moveID project—part of the Gaia‑X 4 Future Mobility initiative—has made significant strides toward redefining how mobility ecosystems work.
FinTech using Verifiable Credentials
Indicio Proven — Decentralized Fintech for Seamless and Secure Banking and Finance
Instead of relying on usernames and passwords, backend database calls, or waving around photocopies of government-issued IDs in front of webcams, a customer can scan a QR code to instantly prove who they are and what they’re authorized to have access to without ever exposing sensitive data or calling back to a central server controlled by a third-party verification service. Just a direct, trusted line of communication between your customer and you.
How Mobile Driver’s Licenses Can Transform Identity Verification in Financial Services
How Will EUDI Wallets Reshape Payments, Travel, and B2B?
In our recent conversation with Esther Makaay, VP of Digital Identity at Signicat, she shared insights on how the EUDI Wallet will affect industries such as payments, travel, and organizational identity.
Here’s what you need to know:
Wisdom from Heather Flanagan
Acting on Behalf of Others: Delegation, Consent, and Messy Reality
From caregivers managing health portals, to coworkers submitting expense reports on behalf of others, to kids navigating school systems with help from their parents, the need for delegation is everywhere. But digital identity systems still mostly assume a clean one-to-one world. And when real life demands “acting for someone else,” we’re left cobbling together workarounds such as password sharing, manual overrides, and endless customer support calls.
Why Governance Decides If Decentralization Works
If decentralization is the design pattern, governance is the scaffolding.
And here’s the important part: we already know how to build decentralized tech. The internet itself is built on decentralized protocols: DNS, BGP, email, and even identity federations. We have working models. We know how to distribute trust and authority technically.
What’s missing isn’t architecture, it’s agreement.
We can make it happen at scale. But without governance, decentralization becomes friction, not flexibility.
Redefining Success: Centralization as a Feature or a Failure?
“What if centralized dominance is just what success looks like in our current system?” That’s not a defense of centralization; it is a challenge to how we think about centralization vs decentralization, and how we define progress in enterprise systems and platform design.
Visions for what to do with all this identity technology.
(Dark Matter Labs) Permissioning the City 2025 Update
We’re excited to share the latest updates on Permissioning the City (PtC). Our vision to transform how urban spaces are managed and shared by communities has taken some exciting steps forward with the development of our MVP (Platform 1.0).
(PhocusWire) Progressing toward ‘seamless’ travel with self-sovereign identity
“Travel represents the broadest range of demands on travelers in their needs to manage and share their identity information in a very compressed timeframe—and that ranges from personal preferences to passports and everything in between,” said Kim Hamilton Duffy, DIF executive director. “For that reason, there’s an urgent need and demand for hyper-personalization, convenience and reduced friction.”
(iComply) The Future of Compliance is Decentralization
When it comes to compliance, decentralization is changing the game. As regulations tighten and cyber threats grow, financial institutions are turning to innovations like edge computing, self-sovereign digital identity (SSI), and AI-powered transaction monitoring with blockchain-secured logs to protect sensitive data and streamline KYC, KYB, and AML processes.
Decentralized Identities – more than a PKI replacement
A fun AI written dialogue that actually gets to some key elements to understand DIDs relative to TLS.
In an internal knowledge transfer workshop, Alice and Bob discuss the merits of replacing keys from different sources and in different representations with decentralized identities. While doing so, they discuss how decentralized identities in combination with verifiable credentials can replace many use cases of public key infrastructure and certificates.
( Accelerate) Defining Digital Identity for Legal Entities
As demonstrated in the BIS Report on “Corporate Digital Identity”, ID&V activities, relying on well designed “Organizational Digital Identity” (Org eID), serve as an “admission ticket” to access a variety of services, a way to enable risk management, compliance, governmental interactions, as just some examples.
Clearly, without this critical foundational layer, it’s practically impossible to ensure seamless and future-proof transition to the new emerging reality where business and society activities are conducted on-line, more and more by autonomous algorithms and systems.
(Dhiway) Unlocking the Future with Data Tokenization: Getting the Most from Decentralized Ledgers
The Internet Trust Layer (ITL)
The Internet Trust Layer (ITL), a rewrite of my earlier “Trust Link Contract Network (TLCN)” paper, introduces a transformative model that eliminates reliance on central authorities and bridges fragmented systems. Built on the principles of decentralized identifiers (DIDs), verifiable credentials (VCs), and deterministic contract logic, the ITL is designed to provide cryptographic assurance, real-time efficiency, and dynamic adaptability across industries.
Standards Updates
Decentralized Identifier Resolution (DID Resolution) v0.3
In 2023, Megical Oy launched the hightrust.id digital wallet patented in Finland and the EU. The company reached a significant milestone when KPMG judged the service to meet the requirements of the high Level of Assurance (LoA High) of the eIDAS regulation, and National Cyber Security Centre Finland included the identification service in its register. Currently, over 10,000 Finnish healthcare professionals use the hightrust.id identification service.
Progress Report from the Creator Assertions WG
CAWG is specifying open-world extension points that use Verifiable Credentials to let all kinds of claims and all kinds of actors embed metadata and rights declarations in C2PA documents, not just the big boys.
As the name would imply, "creators" is a capacious term which includes influencers, independents, rights-holders unions, creative agencies, freelancers, and even anonymous social media microcelebrities alike.
Introducing IOST Signet Ring: Shaping the Future of Decentralized Identity and Real-World Access
Signet Ring utilizes innovative “Proof of Heartbeat” technology, harnessing heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) data to enable decentralized, biometric identity verification.
Social Design of Social Web?
Tech and Social Cohesion : From Harm to Health
That’s the bold invitation behind the newly released Blueprint on Prosocial Tech Design Governance from the Council on Technology and Social Cohesion with the University of Notre Dame and the Toda Peace Institute. Authored by Dr. Lisa Schirch, it’s more than a report—it’s a practical, systems-level map of the internet we could build together.
The new Blueprint for Prosocial Tech Design Governance
lays out systems that incentivize prosocial design—and goes beyond just removing harm.
Doesn’t really cover identity or identifiers but does mention
Tier 5: Middleware to Support Data Sovereignty, Portability, and Interoperability addresses the underlying tech stack to find solutions.
Considering Where we are Dept.
What is open source?
Why the idealistic promise of collaborative software often falls short of its potential.