GovTech Lab issues a new call for solutions on a verifiable digital residency attestation. The aim is that citizens will be able to store this document in a digital wallet and provide them to entities in a move to simplify administrative formalities.
The intention is that the developed solution will be extended to other attestations issued by the public sector in the future.
Officially launched in November 2020, the GovTech Lab is an innovation laboratory that uses open innovation to work with internal (ministries, administrations, public actors) and external actors to accelerate the digitalisation of public services for the benefit of citizens and businesses through open innovation.
On the 21st of July, the GovTech Lab of Luxembourg, which is a joint initiative of the Ministry for Digitalisation and the Government IT Centre (CTIE), has launched a new call for solutions on a verifiable digital residency attestation entitled “Trust My Data”.
In order to digitise and secure the exchange of State-certified data, the State wishes to issue verifiable digital attestation in addition to current physical paper and PDF documents.
“The goal is to allow a secure and interoperable exchange of structured data with automatic verification of authenticity – all relying on open standards (recognized concept of Self Sovereign Identity)”.
Digital attestations shall present data in a structured format that can be automatically read and verified by an entity in real time without contacting the issuer.
“These digital attestations also have the advantage of allowing partial sharing of information that appears on the attestation (selective disclosure). For example, a person can share proof that they are over 18, without having to disclose their date of birth (data minimization),” the Ministry continues.
The “Trust My Data” call for solutions first addresses a verifiable digital residency attestation for the citizen. The idea is that this principle shall be extended to any other attestations issued by the State.
Technical building blocks for issuing verifiable attestations
“To this end, an existing shared trust source, for example the Public Sector Blockchain of the Luxembourg State, will be made available for the registration of the identifiers of trusted issuers, the accepted attestation schemas and possibly the ‘Decentralized Identifiers’ of the issued attestations,” the call for solutions insists.
The solution shall also include a design of a digital wallet “that can store these attestations, manage them in an accessible and easy-to-use user interface, and present them to third parties upon request” the document adds.
“For the digital wallet, it is possible to rely on solutions that are available on the market (preferably open source) and to adapt those solutions to the Luxembourgish market (multilingual, integration through a wallet library into other State or private applications, support of the Public Sector Blockchain, ex Lissi). Today those wallets are typically native iOS or Android mobile applications”.
In summary, several steps must be taken for the issuance of attestations:
- Installation of a wallet by the citizen on his mobile phone.
- Citizen authentication with the issuer (State) (ex: an attestation request demo site).
- Request for attestation by the citizen.
- Secure connection between the platform and the citizen’s wallet (e.g. by scanning a QR code).
- Transformation of the residency certificate data into an interoperable format.
- State certification of the data.
- Issuing of the attestation and transfer to the citizen’s wallet.
The presentation by the citizen of the attestation to a third party and the verification by a third party of the presented attestation are outside the scope of the project.
As people are moving, a revocation of attestations by the issuer shall be possible.
You can find more details and apply on the GovTechLab’s website as well as on the Portal of Luxembourg’s government procurement until the 13thof September 2021.
