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Implementing new electronic identity (eID) solutions for the public sector is a tough endeavour.  Public officers, technical teams, and researchers need to work together in order to solve several fundamental concerns of end users. Co-creation is a suitable approach to design solutions that respond better to those concerns, but it is far from being a “silver bullet”: There are further challenges that should be addressed to make a sustainable impact in the long term.

Electronic Identity (eID) solutions in the public sector have often suffered from low adoption, in turn retarding the development of e-government. An important question is whether SSI-style eID solutions can help to break this cycle.

Implementing truly self-sovereign identities calls for strenuous efforts to unravel the technological, administrative and managerial lock-ins across the assortment of agencies and operations already in the online services sector.

A holistic approach for the automatic and real-time verification of valid ID documents is being developed for six different European countries as part of the onboarding process of the IMPULSE eID solution. It relies on state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence techniques and will provide a transparent and secure framework to detect forged ID documents.

The EU-funded IMPULSE focuses on building a decentralised Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) model by combining two of the most promising technologies available today, such as Artificial Intelligence and blockchain networks, with the aim of facing the limitation of the existing electronic identification systems in the public sector.