Joni Brennan - Accelerating Canada’s Digital ID Ecosystem Toward a More Trusted Global Digital Economy

Thank you. So thanks for joining us. That was a fabulous presentation. I really appreciated a great way to start off the morning with a very important story. So joining Brennan from the, the president of the digital identity and authentication council of Canada, that's the DIAC for short, and I've been attending the EIC for a number of years now.

And one thing that's, I think great about the EIC is that it's an opportunity not only for Europeans to connect to each other regarding what's happening around digital idea around Europe, but it's also an opportunity for Europeans to connect with what else is happening around the world. And so it's a great chance for us to share these global visions around digital identity. And so I was thinking about this yesterday, as the opening keynotes were going forward and realizing that there were three of the keynotes were in some way related to Canada.

So that was, I think, a fun realization in that there are good Canadian imprints, if you will, in this digital identity space. And it's great that we have this opportunity to connect our perspectives. So I thought I'd tell you just a little bit about Canada.

This is, this is actually the 150th year of the Confederation of Canada, and that will be in July. So this is a big year for Canada and you'll note, I use the word Confederation and the word Confederation is the reason that Canada exists is because it is a cooperation of 13 provinces and territories each with their own governments acting under the federal government of Canada. So we have 14 entities collaborating and working together.

So this idea of Federation is not only a technical concept, but for us in Canada, it's, it's the way that we are governed and this way that we are governed and this spirit of cooperation, if you'll hear people say that Canadians have a spirit of cooperation, I think it does go back to, to, to the roots of Canada and this agreement of these 13 provinces and territories to work together, to, to form the country. So Federation is very important for us. So what I wanted to, well, we had some great Canadian speakers yesterday.

I wanted to focus in a bit on what we are working on in Canada now for digital identity and our federal budget was released in April and the minister of finance bill Moreno noted that Canada can be a world leader in digital innovation. And we have to be, we can't afford not to be a world leader in digital innovation. So when we think about the work that we're doing in Canada for digital identity, innovation is a one of number one priority for the current government that we have.

And we believe that digital identity is the cornerstone for delivery of services in many of that in, in much of that innovation. So that quote was from April, 2017. And if we go back a few years to, to 2010, you'll remember 2010 was the financial market crash. And in 2010, the minister of finance minister Flaherty called for a PA electronic payments review task force.

And there was a recognition that the global financial systems were, were, were, were crashing and the minister wanted to be sure that Canada was prepared in terms of the payment system with the latest innovations and that it would be able to have a stable system that was secure in a system that would make sure that Canadians had the best in terms of innovations around payments. And so this payment system task force review team came together and generated three recommendations for the minister of finance.

Those recommendations were to implement an electronic invoicing payment system to partner to create a mobile ecosystem, and finally to propel the development of a digital identity and authentication framework for Canada.

And so it's this third pillar of the recommendations that is the Genesis of the formation of the DIAC, where we are a coalition of public and private sector leaders working together to develop Canada's digital identity framework, as well as proof of concepts, applied research and innovation, white papers to help inform markets and help advance the adoption of digital identity solutions. And one of the things around one of the reasons that we've been able to take this spirit of collaboration and bring that forward, it is that we have the ability to work with the public and private sectors.

And, and what's worked for us is the view of the global digital economy. And so the global digital economy is incredibly important and that's the same if you're in the public sector or if you're in the private sector.

So we really have no question about if we're trying to face the needs of the, the government, or if we're trying to face the needs of consumers in the development of our framework, our suite of standards, we have one vision and that one vision is around the global digital economy and Canada's full and secure participation in the global digital economy as being good for the society and the economic good of all Canadians.

So we've got a great collaborative effort moving forward, major financial institutions, strategy and services providers, software providers, as well, as well as governments represented from the public, from the federal and provincial levels of Canada, as well as the collaboration with all federal, with all federal and provincial CIOs and public sector service delivery leads.

So again, building on this spirit of collaboration, we are able to work together to, to meet this one vision that we have for Canada in terms of our mandate, I'd say the priority is that we're here to help to catalyze this market in Canada, we're here to help organize the market forces, bring them together, ensure that this, that the standards and solutions that are created are open and transparent and governance. And that primarily the principles of security user-centricity and privacy by design run through every piece of work that we do and produce.

So these are principles that that must be upheld for Canadians and Canadians will accept nothing less. So of course, leveraging the work of great Canadians before us Kim Cameron, for example, and the seven laws of identity. We have our principles for a digital identity ecosystem within Canada. And I would say that we have the ability to also collaborate and learn from the initiatives that have been happening around the world.

And we also need to make sure that we uphold those principles, that Canadians will demand and accept nothing less of, and particularly around privacy protection and personal data protection. These, these principles are principles that Canadians will not accept anything less. So that's incredibly important for us. And we wanna make sure that that's represented in our suite of interoperable standards.

Now, what our focus is on developing a made for Canada digital IDC ecosystem that is world class. And we have some advantages that we look at internally that we get to work with. For example, Canada is large enough to be significant, but small enough to be agile, we have this root of Federation built into the governance of the country to begin with. And all of Canada at this moment is committed to this vision to enabling our full and secure participation in the global digital economy. We're here to work together and privacy by design is critical. Personal data protection is critical.

So some of the areas that are working in favor for the work that we're, we're trying to achieve now, interoperability is really the focus of what we're delivering. I think it, I think it was also said yesterday that identity isn't often the goal, it's the services that flow off of.

And so, so we wanna make sure that the services are, are interoperable, that the, the standards are there for that interoperability, such that those compelling services innovations in the entrepreneurship can move forward. And so we, we're creating a business legal, technical framework of high level standards to be able to set the foundation of interoperability for Canadians, for the good of Canadians and for a high value to the public and the private sector and working together. And I know there's a lot of small words on here, so don't worry, there's no tests. You can read this later.

But what I'd like you to understand is there is a suite of standards that we're working to develop both functional and cross cross-sectional that will be, will be able to provide a baseline for interoperability across Canada. And these standards are intended to be verifiable. And we've heard a number of discussions around scalability for interoperability certification programs, and that's absolutely a priority for us as well.

And we would agree with, we would agree with some of our previous comments that we've heard there, but of those that suite of, of 15 or so standards that we've I identified and, and are evolving. The one place that I would like to focus on a bit is the verification of persons, organizations and relationships. And so we see this because our effort is framed for the global digital economy. We see these three verifiable components as underpinning the, the trust layer and representing the interactions that are occurring in the digital economy.

So this is our area of focus and the relationships between persons, between persons and organizations and between organizations are non-person entities are critical for us. And what we realized in this journey of the inclusion of persons and non-person entities in our, in our journey to develop our Canadian principled standards, is, is that what we have seen is that organizational identity, the legal instantiation of an organization and the rules and requirements that surround the instantiation of a legal organization is a field of discipline.

That's happened primarily in silos of excellence and not necessarily working together with the personal identity landscape and communities. And so we've been on a, a, a learning journey that I think has helped us to create a powerful vision of this ecosystem of verified persons, non-person entities and relationships that will, that does represent the global digital economy. So in addition to the standard work development that we're performing, we're also developing proof of concepts.

And again, made for Canada world class interoperability at an international scale is absolutely within our priority set. And of course, blockchain has been mentioned a number of times. And so we also have been working on a blockchain proof of concept.

A paper will be released shortly on this, but proof of concept that we had for the blockchain was proposed by the province of British Columbia and IBM, the problem statement that was developed was around corporate registries, have a need in Canada to share information in particular, there's a new west trade partnership agreement, including provinces from the new west as an economic region to increase trade, to increase opportunities for bargaining in contracts. And under this umbrella, there's a need to share information.

And when the, when the registry functionalities work, they work and when they don't, it takes people to get on the phone full-time and have to actually take apart. What's happened with a particular record. Also the business owner on the other side has no idea what's happened with their record. Once it's been, if there's been a stall in the system or something's gone wrong. So I do have a live demo on my, on my laptop.

So if you, if you'd like to come catch me, I'd be more than happy to, to show you the demo that we have working here. But what we found leveraging a two week agile sprint leveraging the Hyperledger standard, leveraging open governance and neutral governance for this proof of concept was that blockchain and particularly the Hyperledger standard has a real, I ability to provide functionality for this particular use case of corporate registries to share information provenance about the creation name, change amalgamation of a corporate identity at corporate non-person entity.

And so we do find that this, this work will be iterative iterative. We also found that the work leveraging is it was a perfect use case for distributed ledger as what we were trying to achieve was a viewer around information sharing. And what was nice about that was to participate in the proof of concept, or even to put this into production. We're not asking Providence to rip out their legacy systems. So that was important for us as well. And I think that was a good finding, and we'll be releasing a paper on that shortly, and I'd be happy to run that demo for you.

We're also running applied research grants. One of which has been awarded up to 1.2 million, and this is a research grant to explore again, blockchain for what we would call distributed privacy enhancing technology.

So we have a white paper available on our diac.ca website that talks about this in detail, but again, where can distributed ledger technology, particularly also in this case, the Hyperledger provide the means and the mechanisms to record particular elements about transactions in a user centric flow and privacy protecting all of the information regarding consent and notification that happens within a particular network. And so again, I think blockchain Hyperledger was good here because it's trusted private network, private nodes, and has to be verified to get into that network.

So on this particular solution has been funded up to 27 million by varying banks within Canada and also credit bureau networks. So there is a strong commitment from the Canadian public and private sector that we will innovate in the next six to 12 months, our identity ecosystem beyond the authentication and truly to sharing of verified attributes for the good of Canadians. So what's next for us. We are very here to be here at the European identity conference.

I would leave you with a quote from our prime minister, recognizing that Canada's connections to our partners around the world are among our greatest assets and the relationships these relationships contribute greatly to the prosperity of all Canadians. So while we are developing made for Canada solutions, what's good for Canada is being international and working with our international partners. And so we're pleased to be here to speak with you, share your perspectives and ours and see if there are ways that we can collaborate to build better identity solutions for the world. So thank you.

Thank you. Interesting to see blockchain coming in in many places. So I have two questions.

One is, ah, there's, it's there. Why have you decided to treat relations separately from persons and organizations in your modeling phase? You have the three pillars. Yeah. So what I would say is that we've very deliberately componentized each piece of the view that we have early on in the Canadian market, there was a realization that the identity and the credential, the validated identity and the credential should be componentized.

And so there is a, a long underpinning history that each particular function and we call them nouns and verbs, but each function and each type of so functionality and solution that we're trying to create must be componentized. So that was part of the reason to actually separate that at least in this planning phase. And Have you been able already to, to leverage this in your implementation?

Well, yes. We have been able to leverage that. And so we also see that there will be relationships to things as well, and there can be particular metadata with relationships. So we do wanna treat relationships as an individual functionality, recognizing that they are the connectors between many of these components. Yeah. Very interesting. We have this, had this discussion yesterday on, on context changes, and this may be also something to keep in mind. I think it's very identity, relationship management, life management platform. I think it's very related to this type of thinking.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And second question. More practically speaking, when you implement the blockchain technology of Hyperledger, where would be in your, in your implementation or in your expected implementation of the proof of concept, the, the different distributed letters running and where? Yeah. So because in the particular corporate registry use case, there are 14 actors, which is federal provincial territorial. There are 14. So that is 14 nodes. Only. There will be no, no other nodes than those 14, cuz they must be from the government.

So in that case you have a very fi specific number of nodes that will be trusted as their government entities. So that, that they will be run by the government entities. Although there could be other iterations of how that project might work. So this is one use case. So it's a private blockchain, Private blockchain. Absolutely. No. And not so much proof of work need in that Case.

No, no. And, and the concept as well was that it's a private blockchain, only government trusted partners are writing in, but the work that is being created could be then turned around to the E entrepreneur using role-based access control. So we have a lot of flexibility, efficiency and reuse of work that can happen by building on this technology blockchain. And the other thing is that it's when you have 14 actors working together, there are because we are federated of 14 governments. They all have slightly 14 different policies. True.

And so the beauty is that, is that by having a right in node, you can move past the part of trying to harmonize directly all of the policies of each of the nodes. So Very good. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you again.