Advancing a Secure and Interoperable Digital Credential Ecosystem

The FIDO Alliance is coordinating global efforts to align the digital credentials ecosystem through certification, specifications and market adoption programs

Verifiable digital credentials are emerging as a secure and privacy-preserving method for presenting identity attributes. Building on the significant progress already being made across industries and standards bodies, the FIDO Alliance is helping align these efforts and accelerate adoption at scale.

The Digital Credentials Opportunity

Verifiable digital credentials can be an electronic version of identity attributes or can be a digital representation of physical credentials we use in everyday life – such as a driver’s license, medical insurance card, payment card, a certification, etc – stored on a wallet on a personal device that can be presented and cryptographically verified either online or in person. 

Digital credentials have the potential to bring ease, security and privacy to the presentation of identity attributes in our day to day lives; for example:

FIDO Alliance’s Role in Advancing Digital Credentials

The FIDO Alliance is uniquely positioned to accelerate the widespread adoption of a robust digital credential ecosystem. 

The Alliance has proven its ability to create secure, private, and interoperable ecosystems through its work with passkeys. This success has been achieved by uniting stakeholders, developing strong specifications and certification programs, collaborating with other standards organizations, and implementing effective global adoption initiatives:

• Uniting stakeholders: FIDO Alliance has brought together hundreds of companies and organizations from diverse industries, including technology, financial services, and government, to work towards a common goal of a passwordless future. This broad member base ensures that FIDO standards are robust, widely accepted, and meet the needs of a diverse range of users and applications.
• Developing robust, market-driven specifications: FIDO’s specifications, such as FIDO2 and FIDO UAF (the user authentication specifications behind passkeys), are open, and designed to be secure, user-friendly, and interoperable. These specifications are built to complement protocols developed by other standards bodies – notably WebAuthn from W3C.
• Providing industry with world-class certification programs:  The FIDO Certified program ensures that products and services adhering to these specifications meet rigorous security and functionality requirements, providing assurance to both users and implementers. Today, the FIDO Certified program is robust and widely recognized with:
  • Over 2,000 products certified to date
  • A large global network of accredited labs performing third party testing and accreditation
  • Citations in various global regulations, policy guidance documents, and many RFPs
• Collaborating with other standards organizations: FIDO Alliance actively collaborates with other leading standards bodies, such as the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), ISO, OpenID Foundation, EMVCo and others, to ensure its specifications are integrated into broader web standards and foster a cohesive ecosystem for strong authentication. This collaboration helps to accelerate the adoption of passkeys across the internet.
• Implementing effective global adoption initiatives: FIDO Alliance has successfully driven global passkeys adoption through initiatives focused on the consistent messaging and user experience of passkeys, including the introduction of the passkey brand, icon and design guidelines. Adoption programs, such as global events, member co-marketing programs, the Passkey Central enablement website, and World Passkey Day, have raised awareness and significantly increased passkey support globally. In just three years since launch, over three billion user accounts are actively being secured with passkeys, demonstrating the effectiveness of these efforts.

Applying similar strategies and its members’ expertise, FIDO Alliance is well-suited to lead the world toward a future where digital credentials are as pervasive, trusted, and user-friendly as passkeys are today.

Three Workstreams to Accelerate Digital Credentials

Through its work in digital credentials, the Alliance intends to work with its industry partners to unblock the digital credential ecosystem to: 

• Reduce friction for issuers to issue digital credentials and for relying parties to accept them
• Increase trust for users that their data is secure and private
• Create a vibrant, interoperable market for issuers, wallet providers and identity services

The FIDO Alliance is focusing on three workstreams to advance digital credentials:

1. Wallet Certification: This program will establish certification criteria for digital wallets, ensuring they are secure, protect user privacy, and are interoperable with credential issuers and relying parties. This will provide crucial assurance that credentials are handled with proper security, privacy, and functionality.
2. Specification Development: FIDO will develop specifications to complement existing protocols and frameworks from industry partners such as OpenID Foundation, ISO and other standards organizations. For example, the Alliance will develop specifications for presenting credentials across devices by expanding the existing FIDO cross-device protocol. The Alliance also intends to define credential schemes as required to address new use cases as they emerge (for example, digital payment credentials, loyalty cards).
3. Usability and Enablement: The FIDO Alliance aims to accelerate the adoption of digital credentials by drawing on its experience with passkeys to provide the industry with the necessary tools, branding, and best practice guidelines for successful implementation.

Support from Industry Partners and Standards Organizations

Loffie Jordaan, Business Solutions Architect at AAMVA and Convenor of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC17/WG10 said, “WG10’s work includes standards for digital credential exchange protocols. Wallets, being one side of a credential exchange, have to support these protocols. In addition to requiring support for these protocols, issuing authorities often have additional requirements on the wallets into which they provision, covering things like device security, holder privacy, and credential life cycle management. The FIDO work will allow issuing authorities to confirm if a wallet being presented for provisioning has been certified against a profile representing the issuing authority’s protocol and other requirements. In doing so, the FIDO work will be of significant value to issuing authorities.”

Gail Hodges, Executive Director of the OpenID Foundation said, “OpenID Foundation welcomes FIDO Alliance’s new initiative on digital credentials as an important step toward advancing a secure and interoperable identity ecosystem. Our organizations have a long history of close collaboration on standards that make authentication simpler and more resilient, and we see the same opportunity to align our efforts as the market rapidly moves toward verifiable credentials and identity wallets. We look forward to working with FIDO and the broader community to help ensure that digital credentials are built on open, privacy-preserving standards that scale globally.”

Seth Dobbs, President & CEO, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) said, “It will take the cooperation of many to address the challenges and opportunities of Digital Identities on the Web. The W3C Verifiable Credentials and Digital Credentials API specifications are designed to help ensure the privacy and security of web users. W3C is pleased to work with FIDO Alliance and others on the technical foundation for interoperable, secure, privacy-preserving digital credentials that work across different platforms and systems.”

Daniel Goldscheider, Executive Director of the OpenWallet Foundation said, “FIDO Alliance specifications are already foundational to the wallet landscape. We warmly welcome this expansion into digital credentials and wallet certification.”

Patrik Smets, EMVCo Executive Committee Chair, commented: “Through our Digital Identity and Payment Task Force, EMVCo is engaging with industry partners to advance agentic payments, authentication, verifiable digital credentials, passkeys for payment, and digital wallets. Earlier this year, we shared our existing digital payment credential schema activity with FIDO to align and gather feedback from its members. This level of ongoing collaboration is crucial to promoting global interoperability across the ecosystem in how we use identity in payments, and we are committed to working on payments use cases with all stakeholders as this progresses at pace.”

Getting Involved with FIDO and Digital Credentials

FIDO Alliance’s work in digital credentials will be carried out through the Digital Credentials Working Group (DCWG), who will also advise existing working groups on enhancing FIDO protocols and programs to provide improved support for the ecosystem and work with liaison partners to ensure industry alignment.

FIDO members can get engaged by joining the DCWG; non-members should explore FIDO membership to get involved.