Recent content on Digital Preludes
Attestation proves facts about records. Registration proves facts about data transmission. ┌────────┐ ┌─────────┐ ┌─────────┐ │ ├────────►│ Carrier │────────►│ │ │ │ issue └─────────┘ present │ │ │ │ │ │ │ Origin │ │Addressee│ │ │ │ │ │ │ submit ┌─────────┐ deliver │ │ │ ├────────►│ Courier │────────►│ │ └────────┘ └─────────┘ └─────────┘ In Attestation, the origin issues data to a carrier, which…
See you next week in Brussels? Speaking at the EU Cyber Acts Conference in a panel on EU Digital Identity Wallet certification, sharing the implementer’s perspective from Cleverbase.
Layer Attestation Authenticates Interactive Portable 1 Assurance binding Security Remote attestation Evaluation certificate 2 Capability binding Endpoint Proof of possession Public key certificate 3 Attribute binding Claim Federated assertion Digital credential
Poor interoperability prevents File over app software from spreading. When sharing files over email or messaging apps, we’re effectively limited to a handful of universally supported formats: images, word documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs. These traditional formats can’t natively handle structured data like machine-readable invoices or digital attestations. When you attach files in…
It only makes sense that a revival of del.icio.us (but better) now uses a revival of Arial (but better). Dinamo designer Johannes Breyer in conversation with the Are.na team: Now that type software has advanced so much, and we can draw perfect curves and streamline so many steps, some of these elements of Arial feel like a human touch among today’s digitally-produced fonts. It becomes interesting…
In March 2025, Adam Gowdiak disclosed the first public eSIM compromise. His lab extracted private keys from a chip using malware in an eSIM profile – abusing a vulnerability in the Java Card platform. Longtime contributor Eric Vétillard reflects on an architectural root cause: The real surprise is not that this has happened. It is that it took over 25 years for it to happen. The lack of on-card…
The ISO/IEC 19790 standard defines hardware security module (HSM) baselines for government approval, making it central to digital identity design. Until recently it cost over €200, a barrier for non-specialists. Since July, the 2025 edition is free, as is the companion ISO/IEC 24759:2025 for test labs. For mobile documents (mdoc), open access has taken a different form: stable drafts are published…
Credential is my new favourite polyseme in digital identity. In the real world, the Oxford Dictionary of English defines it as “a qualification, achievement, quality, or aspect of a person’s background” or a “document proving a person’s identity or qualifications”. It stems from the Latin verb credo, which can be translated as believing, confiding in, entrusting, and lending. So a credential…
Digital identity protocols share subscriber attributes recorded by trusted providers. Relying parties trust these providers to manage the integrity of subscriber accounts. Tim Bouma advocates for complementary protocols to verify these accounts directly: Technologies like Nostr, decentralized data stores, and append-only logs offer a new design space—where records can be made transparent,…