Following up on the commitment to provide a secure technological platform, and as mentioned in a previous blog, the SOTER project is delighted to announce that we have released the second iteration of our whitepaper on blockchain security.
Electronic ledgers are a key enabling technology for implementing decentralised and tamper-proof data storage with clear benefits in a set of use cases. Within the context of the financial industry and the SOTER project, blockchain is the foundation for developing an infrastructure which enables the digital attestation of identity attributes in line with the current trends of issuing credentials in a self-sovereign manner.
User-centric philosophy & European Digital Identity
In the past year, there has been an increasing interest in the ecosystem of digital identity, which will focus on a user-centric philosophy, control and privacy rights of the users with respect to their personal data. This paradigm has been reflected in the discourse that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated in her State of the Union speech in September 2020.
At the time, the Commission was proposing a secure European electronic identity, based on a technology where citizens “can control themselves what data and how data is used”. More recently, the Commission has elaborated a proposal for a European Digital Identity and revision of the eIDAS Regulation. The document describes a self-sovereign approach as well as a suitability of electronic ledgers as trust services.
The SOTER Approach
The second act of Blockchain security focus whitepaper discusses the security issues that were pending from the first iteration, together with new questions that arose during the definition and design phase of the blockchain infrastructure. Furthermore, the publication takes into consideration the new user-centric philosophy, which has been increasingly implemented across security solutions.
To continue the analysis that started in the first version of our whitepaper, the second iteration reflects the conclusions and agreements that have arisen during the technical and privacy workshops that were held by SOTER partners. In these meetings, the design phase of the blockchain solution and the identity model were drafted, considering the thoughts observed in the first version of this document.
European Data Protection Boards and legal experts from the European Commission have not concluded the final guidelines and privacy impact assessments regarding all these topics. Their mission is to guarantee that identity solutions are aligned with eIDAS regulations and the GDPR. Therefore, the user-centric management of personal data collected in the SOTER project onboarding processes is pending from these resolutions, although it is planned to be included in the evolution of the production-ready marketable platform.
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Author: José Manuel Panizo Plaza, FNMT
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