1. General Impact of the EUDIW in the Education and Research Sectors

Impact on the Education Sector

Impact on the Research Sector

Verifiable Credentials & Mobility: Students, as well as training professionals can store and present verified diplomas, certificates, and student IDs across different EU countries. The EUDIW simplifies applications for further study, continuous training or employment.

Support for Research Mobility: The EUDIW simplifies the recognition of research qualifications and permits, helping to overcome administrative processes burdens for cross-border research projects and mobility.

Administrative Efficiency: Institutions can verify credentials (including micro-credentials) without manual, paper-based processes, speeding up enrolment and onboarding.

Trusted Identity Management: By integrating with systems like eduGAIN, the EUDIW provides a secure, privacy-preserving way to manage researcher identities, enhancing cross-national research collaboration.

Secure Access to Services: The EUDIW facilitates seamless access to educational platforms, library services, and student discounts across the EU.

The EUDIW can facilitate secure access to cross-national teaching.

Seamless Access to research resources: Researchers can use the EUDIW to internationally access research infrastructure, digital repositories, and collaboration platforms.

1.1. Standardisation: The Implementing Acts

The EUDI implementing acts provide the necessary technical specifications and standards intended to make the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI) a secure, interoperable, and, user-friendly tool. The establishment of the EUDIW implementing acts aims to ensure consistent, high-level security across all Member States, allowing citizens and businesses to easily and securely authenticate, sign documents, and share digital credentials across borders. 

Key envisioned benefits of the EUDI implementing acts include:

  • Standardized Interoperability: They define common, technical standards (e.g., for wallets, trust services, and qualified electronic signatures/seals), enabling seamless cross-border use of the EUDI wallet across the EU.
  • Enhanced Security and Privacy: Implementing acts define security requirements, including high-level certification, ensuring the EUDIWs are robust against threats, supports privacy-preserving functionalities (i. e. selective disclosure), and protects personal data.
  • Uniform Implementation of the EUDIW and the EUDIW trust environment: They prevent fragmentation by setting uniform, binding rules for Member States on how to implement, certify, and operate the wallets and trust services.
  • Simplified User Experience: By standardizing, the implementing acts aim to facilitate the creation of user-friendly interfaces for citizens to manage their identity and data. Users will be enabled to store, share, and sign documents (QES) directly from their EUDIWs. The EUDIWs will support selective disclosure (data minimization) as well. 
  • Support for Specific Sectors: The acts and related Large-Scale Pilots facilitate the development of use cases in education and research sectors among others. 

Some challenges related to the application of the specific EUDIW Implementing Acts adopted in 2024/2025 are:

Article 5a: PID & EAA (2024/2977)

Challenges due to unclear distinction between cases where a relying party is legally required to identify wallet users and other scenarios where such identification is optional.

Examples:

1. PIDs for Research vs PIDs for studying

2. eduID vs national digital eID as PID

Article 5a: Protocols and Interfaces (2024/2982)

Interoperability challenges: connectors needed to interact with the EUDIW versions of the 27 EU Member States.

Article 5a: Integrity and Core Functionalities (2024/2979)

Challenges regarding how/how often should PID/EAA providers monitor the revocation of the EUDIW.

Challenges due to uncertainties about whether critical assets (i. e. academic credentials) should be remotely stored for backup purposes in case of losing the wallet.

Challenges specifying who should offer backup and recovery of data objects for cases of losing the wallet.

Electronic Attestations of Attributes (2025/1569)

Challenges Managing the versioning: Different temporality of identity attributes and revocation (education, research, academy membership). 

Article 7 (2): Challenges due to uncertainty about who can make the request for including or modifying an attribute in the European catalogue of attributes.

Security Breaches (2025/847)

Challenge of providing effective information to relying parties and users in case of identity loss.

Challenge of establishing responsibilities in case that the users get the information about loss of identity too late. Inclusion of information about revocation/re-establishment of academic identity in case of identity loss.

1.2. Profiles: Implementing standards

Connecting the European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet into education and research sectors involves significant requirements and challenges, particularly when adhering to high-assurance profiles like the High Assurance Interoperability Profile (HAIP) and user-centric, interoperable profiles like the Digital Identity Interoperability Profile (DIIP). These profiles define how standards (OpenID4VCI, OpenID4VP, SD-JWT) are implemented to ensure security, privacy, and seamless cross-border functionality, often required for exchanging university diplomas or academic credentials. 

The HAIP is a strict technical specification ensuring secure, standardized interoperability for issuing and presenting digital credentials at a "high" level of assurance, as defined in EUDI Wallet ecosystem. It limits protocol options to mandate specific, secure cryptographic methods for wallet-to-issuer/verifier interactions, such as SD-JWT and mdoc.

The DIIP is a set of technical standards and specifications designed to ensure that European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallets, issued by different EU Member States, can work together seamlessly (interoperably). It acts as a standardized framework allowing for the secure, cross-border exchange of identity data, such as digital IDs, driving licenses, and diplomas.

While HAIP handles the security layer, DIIP rather deals with the "semantic" issues.

Some requirements and challenges from the perspective of these profiles and the solutions addressed by educational digital wallets include:

 

High Assurance Interoperability Profile (HAIP) 1.0 draft 05

Digital Identity Interoperability Profile (DIIP) Release v5

How do Educational digital wallets (i. e. eduwallet) aim to address HAIP and DIIP requirements and challenges?

Protocols and Security (Layer 1)
  • Restrictive Profiles Lockout: HAIP restricts the flexibility of standard protocols to a "secure subset"
  • Verifiable Credential (VCs) Formats Support: Education and research organisations should support EUDIW ecosystem’s requirements for specific VCs formats like SD-JWT VC or ISO mdoc, moving away from legacy PDF-based educational credentials.
  • Wallet Attestation is Mandatory: HAIP mandates that the wallet itself must attest to its own security properties. Issuers (i. e. universities) must verify before trusting a VC request.
  • Issuance Assurance: Educational institutions must be able to issue credentials with high assurance, requiring Holder binding, where the diploma is cryptographically tied to the user's specific wallet. 


  • Secure Credential Issuance: Educational wallets allow institutions to issue credentials directly into the user's wallet as cryptographically signed, tamper-proof electronic attestations.
  • Strong Holder Binding: Educational wallets ensure credential binding to the student's unique EUDI identity, fulfilling HAIP’s high-assurance requirements for preventing fraud and unauthorized use.
  • Qualified Signatures: Educational Wallets support Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) for documents, facilitating the legal recognition of digital diplomas across Europe.

Wallet implementation, Semantic Interoperability and Data Standards (Layer 2)


  • Multiple Data Formats: Different wallets might request or deliver the same attribute (i.e., "Degree Title") in different formats (i.e., structured JSON vs. flat strings), requiring normalization layers.
  • Multi-Credential Queries: Complex scenarios—i.e. a research partner requesting a PhD degree together with a professional certification—require advanced query logic, such as the Digital Credential Query Language (DCQL). 
  • Semantic Normalization: Educational wallets facilitate the mapping of varied educational credentials—such as degree titles—into a standardized format (i.e. ELMO, s. EU Qualifications, Courses & Credentials).
  • Verifiable Attributes: Educational wallets enable users to present combinations of attributes, (i. e. "Completed Bachelor's degree" and “Erasmus student status”) which are verified by the receiving institution's system.

User Experience, self-sovereignty and Adoption. (Layer 3)


  • UX Complexity: DIIP’s user-friendliness might be challenged by the underlying cryptography (signing, proving). Users may find it difficult to understand the difference between storing a digital document and granting access to VCs.
  • Offline/Online Balance: Ensuring that VCs (like a researcher ID) can be verified offline via BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) might be a significant challenge compared to online transmission.
  • Selective Disclosure: DIIP emphasises that users are enabled to share only necessary data.
  • Surveillance Risk: According to the EDPS over-asking by relying parties might be possible during EUDI wallets usage, increasing the risk of users’ imperceptible/unwilling data disclosure if the verification flow is not properly designed. 
  • Streamlined Admissions & Mobility: Students, Researchers, Docents can share verified digital copies of their credentials reducing administrative burdens and eliminating manual verification of paper documents.
  • Micro-credentials & Lifelong Learning: Educational wallets enable the storage of digital badges and certificates for smaller learning units.
  • User-Centric Data Sovereignty: Users in academia retain full control over their educational records, choosing which data to share and with whom, improving privacy through selective disclosure. The challenge for education and research Institutions is that they must implement "selective disclosure" allowing a user to prove for example that they have a Master’s degree without revealing their university name.

Trust Frameworks and Legal Compliance (Layer 4)
  • Real-time Trust List Validation: Issuers (i.e. universities) and verifiers (i.e. employers) must validate credentials against national and European Trust Lists (LOTL), which change dynamically when issuers are accredited or revoked.
  • Evolving Standards: The Architecture Reference Framework (ARF) is still evolving, meaning implemented solutions requiring a "continuous evolution" approach. 
  • Cross-border Trust: EUDI wallets work within the European Digital Identity Architecture and Reference Framework (ARF) enabling cross-border trust compliance.
  • Qualified Attestations: By utilizing qualified electronic attestations of attributes, the wallets adhere to strict legal requirements for trust, allowing for seamless integration of national institutional systems into the EUDI ecosystem.
  • Educational Trust Framework: Educational wallets base on (ARF), ensuring that a diploma issued in one EU country is recognized as valid in another.
  • eIDAS 2.0 Compliance: Educational wallets are designed to meet the strict legal requirements of the revised eIDAS regulation, which requires EU member states to provide citizens with wallets that provide high security.
  • Qualified Attestations and Verification: Educational wallets use qualified attestations of attributes as well as verifiable logs and cryptographically verifiable credentials (e.g., W3C Verifiable Credentials) to prove compliance.



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