The project DC4EU (Digital Credentials for Europe) ended successfully after 28 months of work involving colleagues from the Identity and Privacy Management team.

Eviden led the coordination task with the European Digital Identity Cooperation Group (formerly the eIDAS Expert Group), aligning the project's technical specifications and reference implementation.  The team also made significant contributions to the Operations and Integration work package, supporting the project's Education and Social Security use cases and focusing its development efforts on creating a self-contained solution for the educational pilot.

On July 9, the Coordinator organized a final event in Madrid. In late September, at the Final Review in Brussels the consortium presented the outcomes of the project, including:

• four real-life use cases proving that EU Digital Identity Wallets can work in both the education and social security domains (both nationally and cross-border);
• a robust ecosystem governance framework offering unified rules and policies to support secure, cross-border data exchange
• a comprehensive analysis of onboarding processes for Person Identification Data and attestation providers within the EUDI ecosystem;
• issuance and verification legal analysis for the onboarding of EUDI users and covering digital attestations of attributes;
• an open source architecture and interoperability lab to support the integration, testing, and development of secure, standards-based components within the European Digital Identity Wallets ecosystem. 

Main results

• Establishment and maintenance of strategic coordination between DC4EU and key external stakeholders, including the European Commission (DG CONECT H.4, DG DIGIT), the European Digital Identity Cooperation Group, and other cross-border initiatives (e.g., Open Wallet Foundation, ETSI and the W3C standardization committees).
• Definition of legal and technical guidelines for PID and EAA providers, relying parties, and wallet issuers.
• Contribution to project work on trusted registry integration, surveys on wallet providers, and testing reference implementations.
• Education pilot (supported by Eviden technical work) executed three distinct pilot profiles based on different trust models (classical PKI, EBSI Hybrid and Parallel Deployment), demonstrating adaptability to diverse technical and organizational contexts. This involved 36 institutions in 16 countries and supported 19 different types of academic and professional digital identities and achievement credentials, enabling the automated recognition of educational diplomas and professional qualifications across borders. Over 1.100 users were onboarded and over 8.300 wallet transactions were performed (download the official report).
• The Technical Implementation and Open-Source Development work package delivered a reference open-source toolkit for issuers and verifiers that included a pluggable verifier architecture and SIOP2 interface. The Interoperability Lab was established, and technical alignment across consortia was coordinated (read here for more detail).

The project has achieved other important results in Social Security domain with a secure, decentralised digital framework to issue, revoke, and verify social security entitlement documents (Portable Document A1 and European Health Insurance Card). 

Eviden's contribution

• Leading the task of Coordination with the EC European Digital Identity Cooperation Group and complementing the inputs from Member States to the Implementing Acts from a project perspective, Eviden’s contribution has been key to the project's success. Details on the outcomes related to this task can be found in this report.
• Eviden further participated in the Technical Implementation and Open-Source Development work package providing essential services to the project, with special attention to the Education pilot. All participants deploying Eviden components praised their ease of deployment through Docker images and their high-level of maturity with little need for support to debug installation errors. This contribution is highlighted as a success story in the DC4EU website, under the Education header (pilot). 

Alignment

The team contributed to refining the eIDAS 2.0 technical specifications and reference wallet releases, gaining valuable insights that the company can apply to its identity and access management products and services. The team also integrated and validated technical components to issue and verify a large number of digital attestations on a large scale with hundreds of users across tens of organizations. These technical assets align with the harmonized EUDI Wallet technical specifications, have passed EBSI conformance tests, and can play a critical role in EU digital sovereignty.

The emerging demand and business use cases surrounding these wallets, which feature high-level user authentication and issuance and verification of verifiable credentials, will be assessed within different High Performance Computing business lines with customers such as universities, banks, insurance companies, web servers, cloud providers and enterprises (i.e., EU citizens' employers).