Keynote: Opportunities and Challenges of Digitalization in Digital Forensics

The revised eIDAS regulation on electronic IDentification, Authentic and trust Services (eIDAS 2.0) introduces the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet) as the main building block of the future European digital identity infrastructure across Member States. The vision behind this initiative is to offer European citizens and businesses the possibility to securely store and present through a digital wallet a variety of credentials related to various aspects of their digital identities (e.g., driving license, qualifications). In this context, the main goal of the revised eIDAS 2.0 is to enhance privacy, for example, by empowering citizens with the capability of selectively disclosing personal data in a controlled way. To this end, a shift from centralized to decentralized identity management paradigms is being debated. In fact, even if traditional identity management solutions currently in use (e.g., based on protocols like SAML 2.0, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID Connect) reduce the number of credentials users need to remember as a central identity provider is managing user’s digital identities for all federated services, they pose security and privacy risks: (i) centralized providers may track user activity across services; (ii) central data storage increases breach risks; (iii) data might be shared without user knowledge; and (iv) excessive sharing of personal information can lead to tracking and data monetization by services. To address these issues, potential solutions based on decentralized identity management have been proposed that aim to give users control over information sharing, allowing them to reveal only the required attributes. These considerations are at the basis of eIDAS 2.0. The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce the WIFS audience to the world of digital identity wallets, and the security and privacy challenges they entail.