So thank you for, for having me for introducing a primer to self-sovereign identity in Germany. So as you are all aware, self-sovereign identity is now a major thing. We usually also refer to it as decentralized identity because the, the term SSI is stuck. It's not the best term for what we are doing, but it's the term that's there. And the identity in SSI is just a little bit misleading because we're doing so much more than just identity with SSI and Germany has in fact become one of the accelerators of the world for self-sovereign identity and making things happen.
And yeah, I would like to give you an introduction on what's going on here in Germany in particular, I think we can skip most of the introductory sites. So I'm from a company called ITOs. We've worked for a trusted and secure internet and connected world, and which is accessible and easy for everyone to use. And we are in that space for many years. We do a lot of things about the SSI space, the most blooming these days, and we are in the community very well networked.
So we are one of the founding stewards of the sovereign foundation, which was basically the pioneer of the, of the whole endeavor of SSI. And you have Phil Windley here, who was a co-founder of the sovereign foundation. So hi Phil.
So we are also a founding member of trust YP foundation, which was basically building the government's framework for SSI. And we are part of ID, union and decentralized identity foundation ID union will be one of the topics I'm covering today and lots of other stuff as well.
So I want to do three things. The first give a little bit of a briefing of SSI.
I think you probably have heard most of it, so I will make it very brief. Then I will give you an introduction into I union, and we have other members of ID union here on campus. So Adrian do is also one of the guys from ID unions here. Lots of other people from ID union are also at the conference. And then last, I would like to give you an intro into the German SSI pilots, which are driven by the German federal Chancellory.
And yeah, so I think for the next 15 max maximum 20 minutes, I will try to squeeze everything in that's happening in the past year.
So first briefing SSI, you know, the trust triangle, I think this is bridging to the choir here. We have issuers, we have holders, not owners, part holders of, of data items and the wallets. And we have verifiers, which receive the data out of the wallet from the holder when he has approved the proof request.
So this is just the basic trust triangle of SSI, but this is where the magic happens with verifiable credentials, which port data from issuer to verify why are the holder he's full control? And that's one of the, the key reasons why it was coined self sovereign identity, because the person itself is in control of the data flows.
And you actually have heard it many times today. You need a wallet to make that happen. You have a secure digital wallet on your smartphone controls the verify dentals more and more are out there. So my company is also in the meantime, produce two different ones.
And yeah, this is a centerpiece of interaction with the SSI ecosystem. So that's what you need. And you actually can do things better than with classic PKI, which is centralistic system. So you probably have been down that road as well. PKI is nice. It has its merits. It's it's proven technology. It works absolutely well. But with SSI, we have a completely decentralized setup, which is much more flexible and everyone can basically become his own certificate authority in an instant. And this is the beauty of, of SSI.
And we can have a more flexible setup and com data exchange mechanisms with SSI, then trust with PKI.
So one simple use case that you could do with SSI is authenticate yourself against an application. You can scan a QR code at the application. You don't use user and password anymore. You receive a proof request to your wallet app for certain data items, and then you transport the data items. And then in the back end, the system says, okay, you have proven either your identity, you have proven that you're qualified to access the application. And then you are authenticated.
This is all fully production workable now. So if you want something like that to make it happen, you can do it today. So that's one case, but we can do many, many different things more
Moving on to the key initiatives that are happening in Germany regarding to SSI.
First, I would like to cover I union, which is an a, a co-funded project of the federal ministry of economic affairs and Germany. It's part of a larger program of initiatives. It's called identity showcase projects for secure digital identity. And this was already launched in last year.
So the, the initiative was kicked off with the competition phase. There were 11 projects at first who applied to, to receive the funding for three years and a couple of them succeeded. And I union was one of them. It formally was called SSI for Germany. We have transitioned the name to ID union. And this is one of the projects that is funded under this line. This is the core self-sovereign identity project using the open source technologies, Hyperledger Indian hyper to make the use cases happen.
The union consortium is led by 15 consortium partners.
So you see many companies that you are familiar with and some of them are speakers here. Some of them are here, have representations here. And these are the, the core partners of the consortium who receive also funding from that program. We have a lot of associated partners as well, who are kind of supporting use cases and making them happen. And we have received lots of requests for associated partners. And at some point it wasn't possible to handle it anymore. Adrian knows that very well. And we said, we have to come to another model.
And we have, we have introduced something that we call contributor partners, and we are now collecting further ones who want to work on specific use cases. And they get together with one of the core partners and promote a use case. And then we can onboard them and help them to implement their use case.
So Idun is a very comprehensive project approach. It started off with a DLT network at its core. So this was already achieved in the competition phase. So in the competition phase, we set up a Hyperledger in the test network, which already was workable in the six month competition phase.
We already implemented first use cases on this test network. And since then the landscape has been growing. So we have introduced new members to the, to the network. And this is not only a research project. Obviously we want to get experience with the technology more, but we also want to drive use cases to production quality right away. And you see on the right hand side that we have different sectors and covering different sectors with many different use cases. 35 have been the starting point.
I think we will see even more when we go through the funding period,
Actually a lot of the technology is already available to work with the underlying blockchain network. It is obviously a mixed things of end user capabilities and institutional capabilities. So end user capabilities require the wallet. So on the left hand side, you see a couple of examples of wallets being available in the ecosystem for use already. So you see that we have the ITOs wallet. We have the li wallet that has been developed by main incubator, who is the leader of the consortium.
And many different approaches are currently taken to get even more wallets for it out to be very specific on my own opinion. I think there is a necessity to have wallets, but the music plays loudest between the layer of the wallet and the network. So everything that's enables use cases is where the metric will really happen. Obviously we need the wallets to, to make, to get stuff going. But in the end, it is the use cases where you bring the technology to application that is really driving things forward.
On the institutional side, you actually need also something like sometimes it's called institutional wallet, institutional agent. So it's a backend software that is actually doing the same functionalities that you as the end user do with your wallet, but you have to do it on an organizational side. And there's also different components already available like li institutional agent, our platform, business partner, agents of BOSH timeline, Siemens, and from severity, the severity cloud identity wallet. So all this is already there. You can play with it. You can work with it.
You can improve production use cases with this technology.
The plan is to transition all this work into a legal entity that governs the network operations. And the idea was from the beginning to not limit this to Germany only, we said, we want to incorporate more countries, make it international, make it EU even beyond EU with other member, other states, which are not EU member states. So the idea was from the beginning, we will have a European type of legal entity that supports the operations of the network. And this is the union cooperative.
It's a European cooperative, it's a fairly new thing, legal entity that's hooked up on U level and is giving us certain flexibility to drive the, the membership models and drive the governance via a very inclusive model. And this is planned to, to be implemented this year. And actually the network is already running under interim governance.
So we'll, we'll see what, what the next steps are also in conjunction with the other project that I will introduce in a couple of minutes.
I already mentioned that we have many different verticals for, for producing use cases in, so we have obviously e-government and public sector. So the federal ministry of economic affairs was very keen on having things that citizens can use, not only once a year, but ideally every week or daily. So that interactions with SSI become a habit in daily life in, in e-government and public sector use cases actually right next to that is education.
This is also a brilliant scenario where you can do lots of great things with SSI, financial industry IOT. We just heard also from, from, from how so lots of different use cases in different different industries, also coming to e-commerce and mobility identity and access management and health there, the, the chances are basically limitless. So once you have picked up this trust triangle, you can basically apply it to everything that's out there and your personal use cases.
Yeah,
So the, the schedule is a little bit like that. So we want to complete the, the, the founding of the European cooperative this year.
Next year, we want to have a production network. So we'll move the, the test network for, to production state, and also create the necessary trust frameworks going on. This is a three year program. We started off in April and we receive funding for three years and we are 15 core members and we receive 15 million as co-funding.
So the, the members of the consortium are also bringing their own money and they are topped off with 50 million from the federal industry of economic affairs. All right. And if you want to learn more about all that, please feel free to connect on LinkedIn and Twitter and visit our website where you can get frequent updates.
Okay. That was one of the very, very interesting and challenging things that are happening in Germany now. But another thing that is happening and has already started in December last year is the SSI pilot series that was kicked off by the German federal Chancery itself.
And the idea is very much the same as in, in the others scenarios, digital documents are necessary and required to do certain use cases and processes. And I'm leveraging here the original slides from the, from the German federal government, they are used for, for public communications. And we are involved in the project.
So I, I have taken the Liberty to show some of the slides. So this is all public material that is already published elsewhere. So this is actually the same thing we want to move from the way that we know today, like wallets 20, 30 different cards, paper documents to a smartphone based wallet app. And this is the idea that we also make that happen on a politically well adjusted and high level. So this has already been recognized by the, the U European commission O underlying kick off the initiative on the EU level and set. This is one of the key topics that has to be achieved.
So all of you are in that field have maybe heard about, or even read it in detail, the new proposal for the IDAs regulation, which is basically the U legal framework for electronic identities. There's a new proposal out there. And this goes all in conjunction with the communications that have come from EU level,
Same story here. We want to put everything that's in paper or in the, in this cards into a wallet app. So the idea is that every citizen has the capability to drive government processes and other things directly from, from the wallet app.
And this is basically also the same technology here. Again, here in this use case, we are leveraging Hyperledger in the networks and hyper areas components on the agent side. Obviously this is also not something that's just played on a German level. The idea is actually to move it up to a European level, and those of you have monitored.
The, the press in recent weeks have seen that there has been a joint communication by the Spanish government and the German government to collaborate on this European digital identity ecosystem. So this is moving in nicely, and I assume that further member states will also join the initiative going forward.
So again, I don't have to repeat this. This is the slide that is showing the trust, trying a little bit other other way. It's issue a whole model, the same story, and the underlying decentralized network enables all that.
What happened to make this launch and kick off was a collaborative working phase in 2020, that led to a very comprehensive document on what's possible on the digital identity side, if joint efforts are taken, and this proposal was brought forward to Ang Mac late in last year, and she invited 18, 19 different C level executives of large scale companies in Germany to discuss the future of digital identity in December last year, because she, she felt that this is not a public sector, only thing it should be made as a collaborative effort directly with the private sector party.
So it's a public private partnership. So to say, to make it happen, not only on government level, but roll it out to the business side as well directly. So they met in December and discuss, do we want to do something about this to have a counter position to the big tax from and west?
And every everyone said, well, let's try.
We, we, we have lots of use cases that we would be interested to implementing and let's start. And that happened in December. The program was kicked in and lots of effort has been spent in the, in the first, first month and up to now. And I will give you a little bit of the insights what's currently under development, and what's going on. Lots of different tracks are currently pursued from, from different parties and different use cases. Also again, are, are here implemented, you see here, the number of the companies who are contributing in this exercise.
So one of the first things that went live was the hotel pilot. And I will give you a little bit of insight of what actually was done there in a second.
The idea is that you have in your self-sovereign identity wallet, a representation of the data that's on your PAs wise in form of a very fiber potential. So they call this a ID. This means you use your regular German PAs wise and connected via NFC to your smartphone. And this calls an issuer service of the Buni, who is also producing the PE size. So they issue a very fiber credential called ID.
And this is then in your wallet for using in different scenarios in the hotel checkin use case spec specialty was envisioned. So it should be dedicated for business travelers. So the idea was that a traveler has in fact, also a company credential, which gives the invoicing address of the company. So when he checks in, he can use this credential. So those of you who are traveling frequently, or have traveled a lot to know the pain that your private address is on your company invoice and all this mess.
So if you are familiar with that, so this actually solves this problem, because you can do the compliance thing. You present your proof of residency when checking into hotel mandatory requirement, and you present at the same time, the address credential from, from your company. And this is in one proof request together, fed back into the hotel backend system, and everything is done completely paperless, and it's just works nicely and you don't have to sign any papers and no issues occur when data is transferred. This went live in may.
It was a public event where this was launched with, with Dobe and GUCI Michael list. They presented this as the first project that went live under this pilot series. The others are still ongoing. Obviously we have election coming up. So things are sometimes priorities are on different topics actually, sometimes, but actually the work is moving full steam ahead.
A lot of technical developers are working basically day and night.
So to say, to, to make all that happen. And this is a really interesting project with a lot of drive. Yeah. That's was what I wanted to introduce to you. I hope it was a little bit insightful. So you see, we have lots of momentum in Germany going on in the space of decentralized identity.
It's, it's a very strong signal to the rest of you and the rest of the world, actually, to embark on such a project with such a drive and such momentum and make stuff happen within a year. So we have, we have now September, and the decision was only taken in, in December to do it. And basically in may, the first use case went live on a, a network that was launched new and everything may was, was happening very, very fast. So sometimes, well, I have, I've done my PhD about resistance against change in the German public sector.
So I'm, I'm very familiar with slow processes in public sector, but this has turned my, my world upside down. So things happen so fast and it was really great to see that happen and be part of, part of the momentum and, and make the decentralized identity world really happened in Germany as yeah. Outreach point for the rest of the world. Thank you.
