EUDI Wallets in Practice: Early Adoption & Lessons Learned

Anonymous Credentials are digital credentials that offer strong privacy properties by leveraging Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Such constructions have been researched in academia for more than two decades, but seen few large-scale real-world deployments. Especially for the now emerging digital identity wallet ecosystems, anonymous credentials could improve the privacy properties and reduce infrastructure requirements of the overall system significantly.

This session summarizes the current state of the art of anonymous credentials, and will sketch the two general cryptographic approaches for such constructions. We will also present recent advances in research to overcome some of the limiting factors that have been preventing the adoption of anonymous credentials, especially the ability to bind such credentials to the hardware currently available in smartphones.

For a long time, user authentication was implemented centrally within each individual application. With the rise of identity providers, reusable logins and single sign-on emerged. However, identity remained under the control of the providers - not the holders.

Now organizations and users can authenticate to existing IT services using their own digital identity via verifiable Legal Entity Identifier (vLE)I role credentials.

Using an authenticator software, a vLEI presentation is translated into traditional IAM protocols such as SAML or OAuth, enabling seamless integration into legacy systems through a plug-in solution. As a result, no changes to the existing IT infrastructure are required to identify, authenticate, and authorize users from other organizations based on their own identity credentials.

This approach allows consuming organizations to manage and revoke access rights themselves, while reducing the service provider’s administrative burden - such as creating or updating user accounts, resetting lost passwords, or removing access.