Canada has had a commercial authentication model in place for eGov services since 2012. It is backed by all the large banks in Canada and it has been very successful. The number of Canadians conducting eGov transactions has increased, the transaction volume mix between the channels has migrated to online, costs for government have come down dramatically, and business assurance is higher.
The network in Canada today is authentication only - there is no enrolment or identity information. The absence of identity information has prevented some services from adopting the authentication service; some services lack digital identity proofing services. Based on the triple-blind privacy model for authentication the service will be extended to add trusted identity information from banks, telcos and some government providers to solve this market gap. The proposal was interesting enough for US Department of Homeland Security to award an applied research grant to advance this technology for the Canadian network. This applied research is underway between DIACC and SecureKey.
This presentation will focus on the key elements of project that led to the successes to date – the partners, the biz model, liability, privacy, security models, and the user experience. The presentation will build on this by talking about which best practices will be applied to the project as identity services are added to the network. The unique properties offered by blockchain to support this innovation in identity will also be discussed.
