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 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 platform.

• Collect use cases from Research Communities, NRENs and institutions. We intent to interview about 10 relevant stakeholders
• Describe potential deployment models for a centralized identity validation solution
• Discuss deployment models with stakeholders to assertion the preferred model
• Describe the preferred model and investigate relevant aspects like GDPR impact, operational model and sustainability

Identity proofing is very expensive and scales very poorly, especially in cases where the users are (very) distributed. This is the case in several scenarios of research communities as well as in cases where e.g. new students living abroad need to be identified as part of the boarding into an institution.
Multiple vendors offer identity proofing services already, but these service are not very cheap, procurement of such a service is a lengthy and potentially expensive effort and in addition, each vendor offers its own, proprietary API. These factors hinder uptake and deployment of identity proofing within our community and also impedes switching between vendors.
This activity investigates, based on requirements collected from multiple stakeholders, if and in which way this situation may be improved.

• Stakeholders may have very different requirements that cannot be reconciled into one model
• The 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

There is no additional personal data processed as part of this activity

• A report is delivered describing use cases from Research Communities, NRENs and institutions and potential deployment models for a centralized identity validation solution
• The above report is discussed with relevant stakeholders
• A preferred solution is selected based on stakeholder input
• The preferred solution is described including relevant aspects like e.g. like GDPR impact, operational model and sustainability