OSIA* An Initiative by the Secure Identity Alliance

Putting government back in control:How the pioneering OSIA Initiative eliminates lock-in and assures interoperability for sovereign identity programs today

About this report

The OSIA initiative has been created for the public good to enable seamless connectivity between all components of the identity management ecosystem – independent of technology, solution architecture or vendor.

Now, governments around the world can exert full control over their national identity programs – to better protect citizens and their civil rights, to deliver equality of access to economic and social services, and to achieve their national development agendas.

It’s happening today.

*OSIA: Open Standards Identity API

“By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration”

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Target 16.9

The identity imperative

Trusted, legal identity is the linchpin of today’s national security, social protection and economic growth strategies. It is a matter of sovereignty, and the role of a resilient, flexible and sustainable identity ecosystem cannot be underestimated.

Citizens around the world rely on state-issued identities to prove who they are; to gain access to vital healthcare, welfare, education services, and more. Governments depend on identity to drive efficiencies in public services, accelerate digital inclusion and secure their borders.

The need for action Governments must be able to evolve, adapt, and add to their systems. And be free to choose the most appropriate solutions and partners to meet their needs. But to change is to invite additional cost, disruption and the risk of operational failure.

All too often, rapid market evolution and the absence of international standards and national regulations mean national ID ecosystems have developed in silos, on proprietary technologies from multiple technology partners.

Incompatible registries – each with their own data format, ad-hoc interfaces and functionalities – struggle to “talk” to one another and cannot easily be replaced with those from other vendors.

Ensuring citizen data is up-to-date and consistent across all issuing agencies is challenging. While the threat of partner dependency is very real.

In an unprecedented move, the global identity industry has come together to deliver a simple, financially viable and immediately available solution: OSIA.

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CR

FunctReg ABIS

PR

OSIA

PRCR

FunctReg ABIS

CR

FunctReg ABIS

PR

OSIA

PRCR

FunctReg ABIS

Today, OSIA is being implemented in the portfolios of the world’s largest identity providers.

The OSIA initiative allows governments and implementing bodies across the world to invest with confidence – accelerating the development of robust identification platforms for citizens, while preserving the value of existing investments.

A global approach for today and tomorrowBy injecting new levels of flexibility and openness, the OSIA Initiative enables governments to exert full control over their sovereign identity systems.

An elegant solution to a complex problem, OSIA provides a simple, open standards-based connectivity layer between all key components and systems within the identity ecosystem. So everything works together – seamlessly.

The OSIA Initiative is vendor and technology neutral. It protects investments today and tomorrow, and forever eliminates issues of supplier dependency. With OSIA governments are free to select the components they need, from the suppliers they choose – without fear of lock in.

And because OSIA operates at the interface layer, interoperability is assured without the need to rearchitect environments or rebuild solutions from the ground up. Components are simply swapped in and out as the use case demands – from best-of-breed options already available on the market.

This real-world approach dramatically reduces operational and financial risk, increases the effectiveness of existing identity ecosystems, and rapidly moves government initiatives from proof of concept to live environments.

Bringing the ecosystem together The OSIA initiative provides seamless interconnection between multiple foundational and functional registries, and to enrolment and usage services, including:

• Civil registry (CR) – managing vital events including births, deaths, associated certificates and filiation.

• Population Registry (PR) – managing key biographical information on individuals for the basis of ID cards and ID related services.

• Biometric System (ABIS) – managing biometrics and authentication services.

• Functional registers (Funct Reg) – managing data including voter rolls, land registry, vehicle registration, passport, residence registry, education, health, benefits, police and judiciary data.

The OSIA Initiative

FIGURE 1: Current ID landscape with fragmented silos.

FIGURE 2: Integrated ID landscape based on open standards APIs.

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Why choose an open standards approach?

Pragmatic, low-risk and designed for industry-wide adoption, open standards specify the functional and technical requirements that all technologies need to ensure interoperability.

With open standards in place, governments can strategically plan and evolve their systems without fear of future compatibility issues.

This is particularly key in de-centralized environments where registries are run by separate ministries and government agencies.

In an open-standards environment the responsibility (and the risk) of ensuring seamless interoperability is passed from government to the technology provider.

In short, open standards provides a guarantee of consistency and harmonization across government identity ecosystems that is unachievable by any other approach.

The OSIA Initiative is driven by the belief that standardizing the scope of key components and the interface layer, rather than rebuilding components from the ground up, addresses governments’ needs for simplicity, speed of deployment and choice.

Value of open standards• Globally applicable quality assurance

• Eliminates technology and partner dependency

• Removes technology barriers

• Grants freedom from lock-in

• De-risk future investments

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By injecting new levels of flexibility and openness, the OSIA initiative enables governments to exert full control over their sovereign identity systems.

It has been developed based on three core principles:

The Guiding Principles behind the OSIA initiative

“I’m delighted that the era of vendor lock-in is fast coming to an end, yet many agencies and governments across Africa remain unaware of the potential opportunities that OSIA unlocks – including a reduction in the total cost of ownership of their ID systems. Part of my role will be to spread the word and ensure everyone knows they can access the interconnectivity resources they need to enable high functioning and interoperable ID ecosystem.”

Mr Engr. Aliyu Abubakar Aziz Director General/CEO, Nigeria National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) Chair of the OSIA Advisory Committee

1. Sovereignty

The ability of governments to choose what their ID solution “looks like” is a core principle that goes to the very heart of sovereignty. They must have the freedom to decide which components of the identity ecosystem to use, and how to combine them.

2. Technology NeutralityThe value of deployed legacy technologies must be preserved, and governments free to use any technology they choose. Technology partners must also be free to innovate on emerging technologies to finds new ways to solve problems.

3. Privacy by DesignTo achieve regulatory compliance and to ensure an ethical and responsible approach to managing citizen’s data, identity ecosystems must embed privacy by design – from repositories through to interface layers. Ecosystems must ensure data can be user controlled with stringent access rights.

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Launched in mid-2018, the project is already well advanced. SIA members are preparing to implement OSIA across their component portfolios. Work is continuing through an open, collaborative and consensus-driven process.

1. Addressing the lack of common definitions within the ID ecosystem. The components of ID ecosystems (civil registry, population registry, biometric identification system etc.) are functionally incompatible due to the absence of a common definition/understanding of broader functionalities and scope.

The first step has been to formalize definitions, scope and main functionalities of each component within the identity ecosystem, as we see below in Figure 3.

OSIA Project Scope

Population Registry(PR)

Civil Registry(CR)

Document Management System (DMS)

UIN Generator

Biometric System(ABIS)

THIRD PARTIES SERVICES

ENROLLMENT

OSIA

Enrol. Client

Enrol. Server

Private sector(banks, telcos etc.)

Government(social security, tax agency etc.)

FIGURE 3: Components forming an identity ecosystem.

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2. Creating a standardized, open interface.The second step has been to create a standardized open interface.

This core piece of work develops the standardized data formats and open interface to connect the multiple ecosystem components to ensure seamless interaction of services in figure 4.

ID ECOSYSTEM COMPONENTS

SERVICES Enroll PR UIN gen. ABIS CR DMSThird Parties Services

Notification

Notify event U U

Subscribe U U U U

Unsubscribe U U U U

Event callback I I I I

UIN Management

Generate UIN U I U U

Data Access

Get Person Attributes U IU U IU U U

Match Person Attributes IU IU U U

Verify Person Attributes IU IU U U

Get Person UIN U IU IU U

Get document IU IU

Biometrics

Verify U I U U

Identify U I U U

Insert U I U

Read U I U U

Update U I U

Delete U I U

Get Gallery U I U

Get Gallery content U I U

ID Usage

Verify ID I

Identify ID I

Get Attributes I

Get Attributes set I

FIGURE 4: List of services OSIA will interface with. (I) indicates the components implementing the services defined and (U) indicates the components using the services.

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Governance Overview

The OSIA initiative is developed by the not-for-profit Secure Identity Alliance with the full support of its membership. It is governed under a formal structure including an independent OSIA Advisory Committee, with work carried out by the OSIA GitHub Community and an OSIA Workgroup. These bodies have transparent and publicly available terms of reference to guide intra and inter committee relations.

All contributions from the wider identity community are warmly welcomed.

Timeline:

June 2018

OSIA INITIATIVE LAUNCH:

• Build Start Sept 2018

• OSIA v1.0 (CR, PR, UIN Generator) Dec 2018

• OSIA v2.0 (ABIS) June 2019

• OSIA v3.0 (enrollment and 3rd parties services) Oct 2019

TECHNICAL TIMELINE:

• Invitation for contributions from the worldwide ID community Sept 2018

• Stakeholder engagement from Oct 2018 to Sept 2019

• Information meeting at ID4Africa Thursday 20th June 2019 from 11.00 to 12.00

• First meeting of OSIA Advisory Committee Nov 2019

GOVERNANCE TIMELINE:

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GitHub Community & licenseOSIA is based on permissive free of charge (MIT) software license. The open source code has been published on the GitHub collaboration platform, where it is supervised by an external and independent consultant.

Any country, technology partner or individual is free to download the functional and technical specifications to implement it in their customized foundational and sectoral ID systems or components. Governments can also reference OSIA as Open Standards in tenders.

More information, and guidance on how to contribute, can be found at the GitHub landing page, https://secureidentityalliance.github.io/osia.html or at www.osia.io

OSIA WorkgroupThe OSIA Workgroup consists of experts in the fields of identity and open standards software development and engineering, architecture, quality assurance, security, privacy, and biometrics. These experts are Members, Associate Members and Advisory Observers of the SIA.

The Workgroup manages the evolution of the OSIA functional and technical specifications. It also solicits feedback from the GitHub Open Community. It has the power to accept or reject code and control releases.

OSIA Advisory Committee

The OSIA Advisory Board is an international advisory group consisting of members drawn from public and non-profit private organizations. They are bound to the SIA by an Advisory Observership. This group meets twice a year to review the progress of the OSIA Initiative, and offer strategic guidance for the initiative.

OSIA Advisory Committee

Vendor A Vendor DVendor B

Integrator

Vendor C

OSIA Workgroup

Government

Vendors

FIGURE 5: OSIA Governance Overview.

Why the Secure Identity Alliance?

With 85% of the world’s population covered by identity-based applications from members, the Secure Identity Alliance is a trusted partner to work with governments, private organizations and third-party stakeholder to support the global adoption of the OSIA initiative.

An expert and globally recognized not-for-profit organization, the Secure identity Alliance brings together public, private and non-government organizations to foster international collaboration, shape policy and provide guidance on the key issues of legal identity.

Launched in 2013, the Secure Identity Alliance is an open and ethical organization, in which all members commit to a Code of Conduct. Our members include De La Rue, Gemalto – a Thales company, IDEMIA, INGroupe and Veridos. Our associate members include Keesing Technologies and Vision Box.

To see the list of companies who have joined the OSIA Initiative, go to www.osia.io

THE SECURE IDENTITY ALLIANCE MEMBER HERITAGE

• Experience in over 190 countries

• Over 25000 scientists, experts and professionals

• Over 85% of the world’s population is covered through multiple applications by our members’ technologies

• Developed the key ID related technologies in use today

• Participated in the development of the over 1000 ID related standards in use

POLICIES AND BODIES SUPPORTED

• UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

• World Bank Group Identification for Development (ID4D) Program’s “Principles on Identification for Sustainable Development: Toward the Digital Age”

• Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union

• ID4Africa and its Identity Council

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Conclusion: Towards a sustainable future

The OSIA initiative ushers in a new era of openness and collaboration throughout the identity industry to eliminate interoperability challenges that have, until now, hampered the evolution of national identity systems.

Supported by all major ID vendors, and being implemented today, OSIA makes it possible for governments and implementing bodies across the world to invest with confidence; initiating robust identification platforms for their citizens, preserving the value of existing systems while evolving their environments without fear of supplier or technology dependency.

Find out more at www.osia.io

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