by Didi Rankovic, Reclaim The Net:
The push to develop digital ID and expand its use in the US is receiving a boost as the country’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is launching a new project.
NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has teamed up with 15 large financial and state institutions, as well as tech companies, to research and develop a way of integrating Mobile Driver’s License (mDL) into financial services. But according to NIST, this is just the start and the initial focus of the program.
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The agreement represents an effort to tie in yet more areas of people’s lives in their digital ID (“customer identification program requirements” is how NIST’s announcement describes the focus of this particular initiative). These schemes are often criticized by rights advocates for their potential to be used as mass surveillance tools.
Now NIST’s initiative brings together this institution and the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA), California Department of Motor Vehicles, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – Science and Technology Directorate, New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Microsoft.
Among the other participants are companies specializing in digital ID IDEMIA, MATTR Limited, iLabs, SpruceID, and the OpenID Foundation (plus US Bank, and Block Inc.)
They were chosen after submitting a response regarding their capabilities via the Federal Register, and have now received collaborative research and development agreements, known as CRADA.
Those who are now in will work within the project’s three phases, dubbed, Define, Assemble, and Build. The first will set the scope of work along with industry participants, the second should produce teams with members from the industry, government, and academia, while the “Build” phase is to focus on “creating practical modules and prototypes to address cybersecurity challenges.”
They will now collaborate with NCCoE to speed up the adoption of digital ID standards, a press release said, as well as best practices by developing “reference architectures, representative workflows, and implementation guides to address real-world cybersecurity, privacy, and usability challenges faced by the adoption of mDL in the financial sector.”
