Wallet Security Mechanisms for the Decentralized Ecosystem

The concept of building trust relationships is an integral part of a decentralized ecosystem. A verifier must trust the identities of issuers to ensure the authenticity and integrity of data and a wallet must trust the identities of verifiers to ensure data is only sent to identified and authorized parties. The other important trust relationship is in the identity of the wallet and assures both issuer and verifier that they are communicating with a genuine, verified and unaltered wallet. Especially in the environment of eIDAS 2.0, this trust becomes all the more important, as highly sensitive and regulated use cases require a secure environment in the wallet. Among other things, device binding, user binding and wallet authenticity must be proven and issued in a wallet attestation in a technology-neutral and interoperable manner. In this presentation, the general concept of wallet attestations is explained, followed by the current state of discussions in the eIDAS process and the Architecture Reference Document (ARF). Furthermore, I explain the technical realization using the IETF Draft Attestation-Based Client Authentication and how it integrates into the omnipresent OpenID4VCI protocol.