Asymmetric wallet wars

By ANIL JOHN on | Permalink

The user, the identity provider, the relying party all have different power dynamics - Kim Cameron

Ensuring individuals have choice and decision authority when it comes to digital identity wallets is critical to changing, for the better, the current power imbalance between platforms and people.

In 2016, the organizers of the Internet Identity Workshop invited Kim Cameron to give a keynote on the lessons learned over the 10 years from when he originally published the “Laws of Identity (PDF)” on deploying federated identity at scale.

I remember being in that audience and a hearing a critical point that Kim made that day:

The biggest mistake that I made was not understanding the asymmetric nature of the parties involved in identity.

Kim Cameron (Internet Identity Workshop 2016 Keynote)

There was no video or audio recording of the keynote, so I had to go back into the live-tweets from back in the day and piece together Kim’s message:

Kim Cameron IIW 2016 Keynote

The reason for this blast from the past is that it is very relevant to the current conversations regarding digital identity wallets, and I am reminded once more that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it!

Digital wallets without wallet selector capability

The current discussions about digital identity wallets continue to ignore the critical impact of asymmetric power relationships in identity. That has a direct bearing on who has the agency and decision authority regarding the choice of digital wallets, when a particular wallet will be used, and how that choice to use one is surfaced to an individual.

If not addressed by enabling a wallet selector capability under the control of an individual, we will continue to perpetuate the existing power asymmetry by leaving the choice of wallet in the hands of the Issuer (Identity Provider) or the Verifier (Relying Party) via the use of the 21st century version of the NASCAR Problem in Identity, which are QR codes, deeplinks and protocol handlers - supporting only a pre-selected menu defined by platforms and technology vendors using their own opaque criteria with no insight, input or choice possible by an individual.

Using digital wallets without a wallet selector capability

Enabling individual choice is not some abstract, techno-utopian free choice ideal with no constraints or consequences. The criteria upon which we make choices regarding digital wallets need to be more than the marketing articulated by platforms and technology vendors to convince us of their design aesthetics, and how much they care about us as individuals. It needs to be based on something useful to all parties while remaining independently verifiable.

So, a starting point should be to directly address some very legitimate concerns from issuers, verifiers and individuals in mitigating transaction risks.

Independently verifiable wallet capabilities to meet identity assurance needs

Online transactions, in particular, have very real risks associated with them and, in situations where you are delivering a service to a specific individual, understanding if the individual on the other end of the wire is claiming an identity that is their own or if they are lying becomes very important to all the participants in a transaction to both deliver the service and to obtain it.

The term of art used in the identity world for this is “Levels of Assurance (LOA) or Assurance Level (AL)”, which is a category that conveys the degree of confidence that an individual’s claimed identity is their real identity:

Needless to say, a higher level of assurance is able to meet the needs of any of the lower levels.

As a starting point, we need to change our thinking – as well as the UI/UX and supporting technical underpinnings – on how digital wallet selection is made, from picking a platform or vendor to picking a wallet based on its independently verifiable features and capabilities:

Using digital wallets without a wallet selector capability

I will also note that I am using “LOA” as a placeholder and a starting point. What is needed is a set of foundational security, privacy and interoperability digital wallet capabilities that are negotiated and agreed upon by the communities building digital wallets – that are equivalent across jurisdictions – with a clear focus on ensuring that each of those capabilities can be independently verified either through some automated means or by third party assessments.

While those capabilities could be delivered by innovative solution providers in both the public and the private sector, it may also be delivered by platforms and big technology vendors – and that is just fine! This is about ensuring the existence of a diverse, competitive ecosystem where innovative digital wallet offerings can thrive and compete based on their support for open standards and APIs, as well as value added service offerings, instead of being constrained or gatekeeper’d by those with market power.

An aside re: The European Union Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW) Ecosystem

As I wrote recently in “Orchestrating an ecosystem” the EU is moving and leading the way when it comes to aligning polices and regulations with digital wallet technology, so a natural question to ask would be if wallet selection is relevant to them.

Short answer - I don’t know.

Longer answer - As an outside observer trying to learn as much as I can about what they are doing with a desire to not re-invent the wheel within my context, two scenarios where a wallet selector would appear to be important are:

  • EU Member States, seeking to reduce a variety of risks, multi-tracking the development and supporting multiple EUDI ARF compliant wallets
  • EU citizens, with freedom to move and work across Member States, choosing to have multiple wallets

I continue to research this and am looking forward to gaining further clarity.

Work that needs to be done

There is a lot of work to be done in this area, but the good thing is that we are at the right moment in time to do that work!

While I have much more to say, let me save that for future posts and provide just two items for your consideration:

  • If global wallet interoperability is a desired outcome, it requires a clean separation between pipe, payload and policies. Polices tend to be the domain of sovereigns and will differ across jurisdictions, so is there an opportunity to work together, globally, on the pipe and the payload?

  • Browsers currently have their own password managers, but also support third party password managers that provide additional value to individuals. Using that as an easy to understand example, is there an opportunity for browsers to natively bake in support for APIs that can be freely used by digital wallet makers to allow for their registration and selection?

All for now, but looking forward to your feedback on this topic!


  • Revisiting the Interaction Model between the Relying Party, End User and IDP - A proposal to the W3C FedID Community Group to “ … provide a viable way to achieve more End-User choice, greater inclusiveness, increased competition, and reduce vendor lock-in around the IDP options available.” which provides some good background and context for a technical solution and also serves as a bridge from thinking about IdPs to thinking about digital wallets.

  • Credential Handler API (CHAPI) - Presentation to the W3C FedID Community Group regarding CHAPI, an open source wallet selection mechanism

  • Wallet Selection in CHAPI breaks without 3rd party cookies - Summary of a discussion from IIW XXV regarding wallet selection with the Credential Handler API (CHAPI) and the Federated Credential Management (FedCM) work at the W3C FedID Community Group

  • U.S. Digital Immigration Credentials - Presentation by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on using W3C Verifiable Credentials, W3C Decentralized Identifiers and Digital Wallets for issuing high value digital immigration credentials from the U.S. Government. This public presentation was made at the 2022 Fed ID Conference.

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