Steve Pannifer - Consult Hyperion

Identity really is the new money

16th September 202230th August 2023by Steve PanniferLeave a comment

Today is International Identity Day supported by the many organisations around the world seeking to address the huge inclusion issues caused by a lack of digital identity. It is tempting to think that this is a mainly developing world issue and that in the developed world the lack of digital identity services is more of an inconvenience than a real problem. Here in the UK, however there are still up to 5m people who struggle to access financial services because they do not have the right documents or data. More on that in our recent report.

Something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit this year is interplay between Digital Identity and Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). What’s that got to do with the pressing need to give effective digital identity to those that need it most? Two things really:

Firstly, a significant factor in the development of a CDBC will be to ensure it is inclusive. After all one of the main objectives in CDBCs is to provide a digital alternative to cash. The financially excluded rely on cash and so a CDBC may have an important role to play in addressing their needs.
Secondly, whilst the need is pressing, making it happen will take time. The UN Sustainable development goal 16.9 calls for the provision of legal identity for all by 2030. Many CDBC initiatives are operating on a similar timeframe.

The beauty of CDBCs is that, in the main, central banks are starting from a blank sheet of paper, which creates the opportunity to design something well from the start. A big problem in digital identity has been trying to retrofit it into a digital world after the fact.

Another interesting thing is that the emerging model for CDBCs has close similarities to the decentralised model for digital identity, which is the direction of travel in that space. Let me explain a little.

This following picture illustrates 2-tier model for CDBC:

Senders and receivers will have wallets that interact with each other. They will hold the identifiers (backed by private keys) that allow the parties to control the use of their CDBC value. The actual system of record will be a ledger provided by (or on behalf of) the central bank. Wallets will use tokens, which are cryptographic representations of the value managed by the ledger, which are bound to the identifiers (and keys) belonging to the parties.

Now look at the standard model for decentralised identity:

Identity information is sent from holders to verifiers. The information is sent in the form of cryptographic credentials (you could think of them as identity “tokens”) that are bound to identifiers which can be checked in a registry. Of course for those credentials to have any value they need to come from a trusted source – an issuer.

So you can see there is a strong correlation between CDBC and decentralised identity systems. The content of the two grey boxes is basically the same.

Furthermore, CDBC systems will have some very particular digital identity and privacy requirements:

There will need to be controls in place to prevent AML.
The CDBC must not become a mass surveillance system.
The system must allow anonymous transactions in some circumstances but not all.
Users must have control over how much data is shared (and in some cases if the user is not willing to share data the transaction will not be able to be completed).

These requirements could be met very well through the use of decentralised identity technologies such as those being developed in W3C, which support the presentation of verifiable identity information whilst employing strong privacy controls. There seems to be a strong case for the CDBC community to collaborate with the identity community. We have a foot in both camps and are working hard to ensure that the years of work put into decentralised identity is leveraged effectively in CDBCs.

It really is the case that Identity is the New Money.

Will the UK identity framework support decentralised identity?

7th September 20217th September 2021by Steve PanniferLeave a comment

In our Live 5 for 2021, we said that governance would be a major topic for digital identity this year. Nowhere has this been more true than in the UK, where the government has been diligently working with a wide set of stakeholders to develop its digital identity and attribute trust framework – the rules of road for digital identity in the UK. The work continues but with the publication of the second iteration of the framework I thought it would be helpful to focus on one particular aspect – how might the framework apply to decentralised identity, given that is the direction of travel in the industry.

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Digital Identity Wallets are coming

17th June 202117th June 2021by Steve PanniferLeave a comment

I was delighted to be asked to present a keynote at the FIDO Authenticate Summit and chose to focus on digital identity governance, which is something of a hot topic at the moment. Little did I know that the day before my session was recorded the European Commission would propose a monumental change to eIDAS, the Europe Union’s digital identity framework – one of the main examples I was planning to refer to. I hastily skimmed the proposed new regulation before the recording but have since had the time to take a more detailed look.

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Internet voting – challenging but necessary

10th November 202010th November 2020by Steve Pannifer3 Comments

What did you think of the US election? I don’t mean the candidates and the outcome. What did you think of the election process? Should it be possible for national elections of this type to be done online? Last week the IET published a paper on internet voting in the UK, led by our good friend at the University of Surrey, Professor Steve Schneider. It’s well worth a read. As the paper explains, internet voting for statutory political elections is a uniquely challenging problem. Firstly voting systems have exacting requirements and secondly, the stakes are high with the threat of state level interference.

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The best definition of Digital Identity

24th September 20205th October 2020by Steve PanniferLeave a comment

Our friends at Smartex challenged its readership to define Digital Identity the other day, with a bottle of wine on offer for the best definition. I’m pleased to say that the bottle of wine was won by Consult Hyperion, with a couple of competition entries submitted.

Coming up with a definition for digital identity is not easy. It can refer to quite a number of different things, making the task of encapsulating it in a sentence next to impossible. For my attempt I thought that rather than try to describe what it is, it would be better to describe what it does. I came up with this:

Digital identity allows us to trust each other by enabling us to share the minimum amount of verifiable information needed for the thing we want to do.

In one sentence I was trying to capture several points:

Digital identity is a means to an end not an end in itself
It’s bi-directional – in any transaction both parties need to have confidence in the other party
It’s about the information you need to share, which will vary considerably between contexts.
It protects privacy by only sharing the information (or claims) necessary.

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Would you use the NHSX app?

7th May 20207th May 2020by Steve PanniferLeave a comment

I listened with interest to yesterday’s parliamentary committee on the proposed NHSX contact tracing app, which is being trialled on the Isle of Wight from today. You can see the recording here.

Much of the discussion concerned the decision to follow a centralised approach, in contrast to several other countries such as Germany, Switzerland and Ireland. Two key concerns were raised:

1. Can a centralised system be privacy respecting?
Of course the answer to this question is yes, but it depends on how data is collected and stored. Cryptographic techniques such as differential privacy are designed to allow data to be de-indentified so that is can be analysed anonymously (e.g. for medical research) for example, although there was no suggestion that NHSX is actually doing this.

The precise details of the NHSX app are not clear at this stage but it seems that the approach will involve identifiers being shared between mobile devices when they come into close proximity. These identifiers will then be uploaded to a central service to support studying the epidemiology of COVID-19 and to facilitate notifying people who may be at risk, having been in close proximity to an infected person. Whilst the stated intention is for those identifiers to be anonymous, the parliamentary debate clearly showed there a number of ways that the identifiers could become more identifiable over time. Because the identifiers are persistent they are likely to only be pseudonymous at best.

By way of contrast, a large team of academics has developed an approach called DP-3T, which apparently has influenced designs in Germany and elsewhere. It uses ephemeral (short-lived) identifiers. The approach is not fully decentralised however. When a user reports that they have COVID-19 symptoms, the list of ephemeral identifiers that user’s device has received, when coming into close proximity to other devices, is shared via a centralised service. In fact, they are broadcast to every device in the system so that risk decisioning is made at the edges not in the middle. This means that no central database of identifiers is needed (but presumably there will be database of registered devices).

It also means there will be less scope for epidemiological research.

All of this is way beyond the understanding of most people, including those tasked with providing parliamentary scrutiny. So how can the average person on the street or the average peer in Westminster be confident in the NHSX app? Well apparently the NHSX app is going to be open sourced and that probably is going to be our greatest protection. That will mean you won’t need to rely on what NHSX says but inevitably there will be universities, hackers, enthusiasts and others lining up to pick it apart.

2. Can a centralised system interoperate with the decentralised systems in other countries to allow cross border contact tracing?
It seems to us that whether a system is centralised or not is a gross simplification of the potential interoperability issues. True, the primary issue does seem to be the way that identifiers are generated, shared and used in risk decisioning. For cross border contact tracing to be possible there will need to be alignment on a whole range of other things including technical standards, legal requirements and perhaps even, dare I say it, liability. Of course, if the DP-3T model is adopted by many countries then it could become the de facto standard, in which case that could leave the NHSX app isolated.

Will the NHSX app be an effective tool to help us get back to normal? This will depend entirely on how widely it is adopted, which in turn will require people to see that the benefits outweigh the costs. That’s a value exchange calculation that most people will not be able to make. How can they make a value judgment on the potential risks to their civil liberties of such a system? The average user is probably more likely to notice the impact on their phone’s battery life or when their Bluetooth headphones stop working.

There’s a lot more that could be said and I’ll be discussing the topic further with Edgar Whitley, Nicky Hickman and Justin Gage on Thursday during our weekly webinar.

The “isRecovered?” attribute

17th March 202028th May 2020by Steve PanniferLeave a comment

So far the tech giants seem to be the coronavirus winners, with a massive surge in digital communications and online orders. The impact on lift sharing companies is less clear.

The guidance from both Uber and Lyft says that if they are notified (by a public health authority) that a driver has COVID-19 they may temporarily suspend the driver’s account. It is not exactly clear how this would work.

That got us wondering whether digital identity systems, that we spend so much time talking about, could help. It seems to me there are two potential identity questions here:

1. Is the driver who Uber or Lyft thinks it is?

2. Does the driver have coronavirus?

The first question should be important to Uber and Lyft at any time. Ok, for the moment they want to be sure that they know who is driving to give them a better chance of knowing if the driver has the disease. But there are all sorts of other reasons why they might want to be sure that the driver is who they think it is – can the person legally drive for one.

The second question is harder. Just because the driver doesn’t have the virus today, doesn’t mean he or she won’t have it tomorrow. Maybe, perhaps the ability to share an isRecovered? attribute that says “I’ve recovered from the illness” would be useful when we start to see the light at the end of this tunnel we are entering. And the ability to share that anonymously might be helpful too – providing assurance to both driver and passenger.

All this to one side, the guidance from both Uber and Lyft outlines financial measures they are putting in place to provide security to drivers that self-isolate. That is a great example of responsibility providing the incentive and support required to allow their drivers to do the right thing.