Identosphere 252 Nov 3-9: UK Identity • OpenID Fnd Verifiable Credentials Help Address Fraud • Web of Trust Map • The Role of the Unique Identifiers in civil registration
This is the weekly Identosphere Newsletter sharing highlights from around the web covering Decentralized and Self-Sovereign Identity curated by Kaliya Young, Identity Woman.
Upcoming
Redefining Age Assurance November 19 9:30 AM - 12:10 PM ET Virtual
SIDI Hub Pre-Conference Workshop @ TRUSTECH 2025 - Paris, France | Tuesday, 2 December 2025 | 14:00 – 18:00 CET
Join us at the 1EdTech Digital Credentials Summit in Philadelphia, February 18-20, 2026.
DID Unconference Africa (an IIW Regional Event) Feb 24-26, 2026 Cape Town
Hiring
Research Associate (PostDoc) Position in Computer Science on the Security and Privacy of Digital Identity Wallets
The candidate will be funded through an industry partnership with Luxembourg’s Ministry for Digitalisation, as well as other industry partnerships or public research projects. Carry out research in the field of digital identity wallets,
Engaging with Governments
Submission to UK Government Harnessing the potential of new digital forms of identification
Evidence Submission to The Home Affairs Select Committee House of Commons: “Written evidence submitted by The Age Verification Providers Association (HAR3318)
So, the first question for the Committee is why would the government now wish to invest millions of pounds and take several years to re-invent the wheel and create a parallel government-issued
alternative to the existing solution already implemented by the same government?
Physical ID, private sector alternatives pitched to save UK digital identity plan
(Tony Blair Institute) [Report] Time for Digital ID: A New Consensus for a State That Works
Public-opinion research commissioned by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), published for the first time in this paper, shows that digital ID enjoys majority support among the British public, with 62 per cent in favour and just 19 per cent opposed.
(Nat Sakamura) [Japan] Digital Agency: First Expert Meeting on Attribute Certification Issues
I participated in the First meeting of Digital Agency’s “Experts’ Committee on Attribute Certification Issues“ remotely as a committee member
Switzerland’s E-Challenges — And What the World Can Learn
As a global leader in direct democracy, Switzerland faces a unique test: how to scale secure, private, and verifiable E-Collecting, E-Voting, national E-ID, patient health records across 26 cantons — without eroding public trust and losing digital sovereignty.
DIACC AI Consultation Submission to the [Canadian] Federal Government
Canada has the opportunity not only to develop world-class AI capabilities, but also to build an ecosystem where AI innovation and responsible deployment are enabled by a strong foundation of digital trust, identity, authentication, and interoperability. DIACC’s mission is to accelerate the adoption of digital trust by enabling privacy-respecting, secure, interoperable digital trust and identity verification services through the DIACC Pan-Canadian Trust Framework (PCTF).
(UIDAI) [Video] Verify your users through Aadhaar Verifiable Credentials – in a privacy preserving manner
Making a case for a Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) Act for America
America’s current digital landscape is a patchwork of systems across states, agencies and private companies and misses an interoperability layer. This means fragmented identity verification, uneven instant payment networks, and siloed data exchange rules and mechanisms. This fragmentation not only frustrates citizens but also costs taxpayers billions, leads to inefficiency and fraud.
European Digital Identity Framework as part of eIdAS - Timeline
Verifiable Credentials Help Address Fraud
(OIDF) [Blog Post] Verifiable credentials: a valuable tool in the fight against rising ID fraud?
[Report] Proposed mDL Metadata Framework to support KYC & CIP Compliance for the United States
[Report] Harmonized mDL Metadata for eKYC & CIP: Comparative Analysis and Implementation Guidance
Supply Chains
RBA Launches Interoperable Data Exchange for Supply Chain Transparency
Large-scale pilot of the Responsible Business Transparency Protocol is underway. The Responsible Business Alliance (RBA) today announced the live implementation of its Responsible Business Transparency Protocol (RBTP), a data exchange protocol built on the United Nations Transparency Protocol (UNTP) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) verifiable credentials.
Standards
VC Bitstring Status List Interoperability Report 1.0: Test Interoperability Report for Verifiable Credentials status 02 November 2025
VCALM v0.9: A Verifiable Credential API for Lifecycle Management
WorldCoin Watch Continues
Worldcoin’s Orb Scans Your Iris—But at What Cost?
Thoughtful
(David Birch) Cybersecurity Is A Digital Identity Problem And We Must Deal With It
I am skeptical about maximal SSI, because I think that most people (e.g., me) lack the persistent competence necessary to manage identities for themselves, but I think some form of custodial SSI where the identities are managed by regulated institutions on behalf of customers make a lot of sense.
(IdentityWeek, Mike Leahy) The fiduciary commons: restoring ordered liberty in the age of data
This Article proposes a corrective: the fiduciary commons, a legal and institutional architecture that recasts the relationship between individuals, institutions, and information as one of entrustment rather than ownership. Drawing from property theory, information law, fiduciary doctrine, and constitutional liberty jurisprudence, it argues that while databases may be proprietary, the underlying facts they contain exist within an unownable commons— a domain of truth that must remain free from enclosure.
Think Globally, Act Locally: HCF at the Intersection of Global Digital Governance and Local Implementation
The participation of the Human Colossus Foundation in both an international and Swiss events underlines the necessity of new globally accessible protocols for digital authenticity and integrity.
(SpruceID) Translating Privacy Law into Digital Architecture
Explore how statutory privacy protections become real through code and technical standards.
(Heather Flanagan) The Infrastructure We Forgot We Built
So let’s talk about that outage. On 19 October 2025, an AWS outage (of course it was the DNS) made the Internet wobble. Payments failed. Authentication broke. Delivery systems froze. For a few hours, the digital economy looked a lot less digital and a lot more fragile.
Agentic IA Identity
Inter-Agent Trust Models: A Comparative Study of Brief, Claim, Proof, Stake, Reputation and Constraint in Agentic Web Protocol Design—A2A, AP2, ERC-8004, and Beyond
This paper comparatively analyzes six trust models (Brief, Claim, Proof, Stake, Reputation, and Constraint) in emerging inter-agent protocols like Google’s A2A and Ethereum’s ERC-8004, examining how LLM-specific vulnerabilities such as prompt injection and hallucination expose weaknesses in purely reputational or claim-based approaches. The authors argue no single mechanism suffices and recommend hybrid “trustless-by-default” architectures that anchor high-impact actions in cryptographic proof and staked collateral, augmented by identity claims and reputation overlays for flexibility.
(Heather Flanagan) Roads, Robots, and Responsibility: Why Agentic AI Needs Identity Infrastructure
Identity in the age of agentic AI? Same deal. It’s infrastructure. And just like a good road system, it needs to be engineered with care, built on solid standards, and ready for traffic we can’t even imagine yet.
Making Sense of it All
[Report] Web of Trust Map: The Global Infrastructure of Decentralized Digital Identity
Decentralized identity technologies have been on the rise for the past decade, yet until recently there had never been a systematic effort to map all initiatives claiming to use the technology or aligning with self-sovereign identity principles. To address this, Key State Capital initiated the Web of Trust Map research in 2022, documenting government-affiliated decentralized identity projects, consortia, collaborators, and technologies. This report, based on projects announced up to July 2023, provides an overview of the ecosystem’s maturity, the dominant technologies, and the actors driving development.
[Podcast] Digital identity adoption: Global trends, challenges, and the path to trust
This month, we spoke with Ivette Cano, Chief Marketing Officer and Niza González, Head of Data at Key State Capital, an early-stage venture firm and ecosystem catalyst driving innovation in decentralized identity.
[Report] (UNICEF) The Role of the Unique Identifiers in Civil Registration and Vital Statistics and National Identification Systems
Unique identifiers, often in the form of a unique identification number (UIN), are critical in the management of administrative records…Unique identifiers also pose specific risks for people in vulnerable situations and groups at risk of marginalization, including those relating to data protection and privacy, exclusion through system design or technology limitations and failures, and unintended uses of linked data…In light of these benefits and risks, due consideration should be given to developing both robust identifiers and strong supporting systems.