Over a seven-week period, the remote interoperability event successfully tested participants’ ability to work together in an interoperable way.
A large-scale international testing event
More than 130 people from all over the world – Europe, Japan, the United States and New Zealand – took part in the remote interoperability event this spring 2024. The event, which ran from May 6th to June 23rd, brought together representatives not only from POTENTIAL but also from other European pilot projects such as the EU Digital Wallet Consortium (EWC), Digital Credentials for Europe (DC4EU) and NOBID – Nordic-Baltic eID Wallet Consortium, from the Open ID and Open Wallet Foundations as well as from the ISO Organization.
Addressing project delays and testing key protocols
“We decided to organize this event in order to mitigate the consequences of the delay related to external dependencies that we experienced during POTENTIAL”, explains Dr. Enrico Rizzo, Head of the Solution Delivery for Digital Identity, Credentials, and Wallets at the Bundesdruckerei GmbH in Germany and member of the technical and architecture leadership team in POTENTIAL, “and we have opened it up to participants outside of POTENTIAL because we were all facing the consequences of these external dependencies whilst building together this ecosystem”.
During the event, the participants tested 6 tracks: two about the issuance of Person Identification Data (PID) and mobile driving licence (mDL), and 4 about the presentations of these and additional digital documents: “the event gave us the opportunity to actually test the maturity of the protocols and the technical baselines that will become crucial in the eIDAS ecosystem” details Dr. Enrico Rizzo.
The protocol used in the issuance segment – between the issuer and the wallet- is called Open ID for VCI (Open ID for a verified credential issuance). “As for the presentations, we needed to make sure that the wallet connected to a reader and that the information about the credentials submitted by a person were transported from the wallet to the reader. From the perspective of eIDAS 2.0, we decided to mostly focus on the protocol Open ID for VP (Open ID for verifiable presentation)” describes Dr. Enrico Rizzo.
Encouraging results and identified challenges
The participants to the event were given the possibility to publish the results of the tests they have been involved. The results published show an encouraging success rate: in 80% of the cases, the participants managed to successfully issue or present an mDL or a PID: “We have to bear in mind that we’re looking at a subset of the interactions that occurred during the Interop Event that is strongly biased and likely not completely representative” adds the professional, “But being able to successfully test so many cases in such a short time span is something we deem as very positive and encouraging”.
According to Dr. Enrico Rizzo, failures, when occurred, fell into three distinct categories: the maturity levels of the components involved, the constraints of the testing setup and, finally, the availability of representatives to address questions from other participants.
Preparing for the Hackathon: the next milestone
With this event behind us, all eyes are now on the Hackathon event, which will be a three-day face-to-face event organized in Dresden, Germany at Vodafone’s innovation centre at the end of August2024. This event, which will bring together over 50 hackers, will focus on the POTENTIAL project: “during this Hackaton, we are going to concentrate on UC1,2,3 and 6 in order to create a base line for the cross-border testing,” concludes the expert.