In the past years, technology for validating a user's identity using a combination of a mobile phone, an identity document like a passport with NFC chip and improvements in real time facial recognition technology, have made real time, remote and trusted identity validation viable. As a result several vendors are now offering such a service, such as READ.ID and SisuID.

In the R&E community there are multiple use cases for this kind of technology. Two very dominant cases are:

• Identity vetting for research communities, typically as part of the onboarding of a user into the community. This use case [1] was brought up by CSC/Elixir and there are indications also BBMRI and Lumi EuroHPC project would benefit from such capabilities.
  The use case was also previously identified in the work in the incubator on identity vetting and 2FA token binding and led to an activity that integrated with the READ.ID service. In addition, eduTEAMS has shown interest in having this capability.
• Identity vetting for foreign students who are enrolling into a campus. This scenario was brought up by SURF, and CSC expressed interest in such a capability as well.

Other potential use cases may include the use of a passport for second factor authentication and using it as a way to do token recovery of other 2FA tokens.

Previous work in the incubator (on READ.ID) and also within CSC/Elixir (on SisuID) have shown that on the technical side implementation of such services which are offered by vendors is not too difficult for a skilled technical team. However, typically the APIs and interfaces offered by the vendors do not align well with commonly used APIs in the R&E community. Furthermore, while the vendors services provide similar capabilities highlevel, there are some differences e.g in LoA which can be established and in user experience.

This activity will investigate the a possible business case for creating and operating a neutral, pan EU identity validation broker, targeted toward EU research and education use cases. The platform should offer (one or more) standardized APIs towards consuming services (SAML/OIDC/REST), while engaging with multiple platforms offering identity validation capabilities. For vendors the platform should be an open platform. This multi vendor strategy will allow NRENs, Campuses, Research Communities and perhaps even end users to make their own choices about which vendors to engage with, while still benefiting from standardized interfaces and economies of scale.The platform and its operator should take care of integration with the vendors as well as take care of technical, legal and security considerations that come with the operation of such a platformto support identity verification and will consider a number of ways of delivering this (e.g. as an identity broker for a range of possible commercial identity verification services, as a GEANT offered service, as an information portal pointing to services etc).

• Stakeholders may have very different requirements that cannot be reconciled into one modelThe preferred model may bring unacceptable challenges to a potential operator
• A centralized solution may not be cost effective
• A centralized solution may not be sustainable

The study identified that a number of factors contribute to the efficient onboarding of users to access digital services and that an automated or automation-assisted document-based identity verification solution could be of benefit for the R&E community, particularly amongst certain segments of users, where the problem is most acute. This was confirmed through interviews with stakeholders, and although there was no strong pull for an immediate solution by many, some are already investigating or deploying solutions and many others expressed strong interest. Due to the early stage of this area the study was not able to determine the exact requirements of any solution or the potential deployment models, nevertheless it was able to collect valuable information and to make recommendations for subsequent steps. Although other identity-based initiatives such as eIDAS and European student card initiatives are underway the state of these initiatives indicates that there may still be utility in a document-based identify verification solution, at least in the short and medium term.

Our findings indicated a strong desire for information about the capabilities of the various document-based identity verification solutions, which would help in defining what the requirements and suitable deployment model for an R&E focused solution could be. In particular we concluded that further work would be needed to reach a definitive conclusion and recommended:

• Establishment of a platform for information capture and exchange on document-based identity verification solutions
• Comparative analysis of available commercial solutions should be performed and made available
• Surveying of the broader R&E community based on the findings so far to see the level of interest and support more generally
• Constructing a preliminary business case for a community-operated service following the broader survey

It is hoped that an interested party or parties can take this work forward, as further work on this topic is currently outside the scope of the Incubator.