Launching a global, web-first foundation for secure, user-controlled digital identity

Digital identity has reached an inflection point. Governments, standards bodies, and private-sector innovators all agree that the Internet needs a reliable way for people to prove who they are, and increasingly, to prove specific attributes about themselves: securely, privately, and across borders. The last decade has seen major advances, including national eID systems, mobile driver’s licenses, selective disclosure credentials, and cross-border wallet pilots. Yet one issue remains unresolved.

Identity is becoming tied to proprietary mobile platforms, fragmenting the user experience and limiting who can build, deploy, and oversee digital identity solutions. This trend risks excluding those without capable devices, complicating regulatory oversight, and creating long-term dependencies that neither governments nor enterprises can sustainably manage.

The SIROS Foundation exists to change that.

Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Stockholm, SIROS is a neutral, non-profit organisation dedicated to providing the next-generation digital identity platform for the Internet, one that is secure, privacy-preserving, interoperable, and accessible to everyone. Our mission builds on the open-source wwWallet project, developed by GUnet, Sunet, and Yubico, and now stewarded by SIROS as the anchor of an Internet-first approach to digital identity.

Digital Identity Is Becoming Dependent on Platforms

Identity today is shaped by powerful trends in the mobile ecosystem and in the design of modern browsers. Increasingly, the tools required to build secure identity systems, such as cryptographic APIs, secure elements, identity wallets, and account-level permissions, are implemented in proprietary layers controlled by operating system vendors.

For many technologists and developers, this means critical functionality is gated behind platform-specific APIs. For regulators, it means unpredictable behaviour across devices when trying to enforce eIDAS2 requirements uniformly. For governments and enterprises, it means long-term dependence on ecosystem vendors who do not share the same policy mandates or time horizons.

This shift toward intentionality, where sensitive operations must be explicitly mediated by platform APIs, was introduced for legitimate security reasons. But it has an unintended consequence: it limits the web’s historic role as an open, permissionless innovation platform.

As a result:

• Identity becomes mobile-only. High-assurance capabilities are locked behind device hardware.

• Cross-platform differences persist. Standards alone cannot enforce consistent wallet behaviour.

• Regulators have fewer options. Enforcement depends on platform vendors, not public infrastructure.

• Trust becomes centralised. Critical identity functions rely on a very small number of technology companies.

For identity to work at a global scale, the Internet needs an independent, web-native identity layer, one that does not depend on platform lock-in or device capabilities.

Identity Shouldn’t Require a Mobile Phone

A core motivation behind SIROS is the belief that digital identity must not be limited to people who own a modern smartphone.

Mobile-only identity architectures unintentionally exclude:

• People in lower-income populations

• Individuals working in phone-restricted environments

• Older adults using shared devices

• Communities affected by disasters or infrastructure failures

• Users who rely on hardware security keys rather than handheld devices

The SIROS architecture, and the wwWallet implementation in particular, is designed so that the user can access their credentials from any browser on any device, as long as they control a FIDO passkey. As described in the Technical Overview, wwWallet has no account, no backend profile, and no stored user information outside the encrypted data the user controls. Every credential is encrypted with a user-held FIDO passkey using the WebAuthn PRF extension.

This enables scenarios that are difficult or impossible with mobile-first approaches, for example a relief worker proving affiliation using a borrowed laptop in a disaster zone, student retrieving credentials at a university kiosk after losing their phone, or journalist presenting a digital press pass from any secure terminal.

FIDO Passkeys as the Foundation

When Google studied the deployment of mobile MFA apps more than a decade ago, they found that app-based authentication generated support burdens and usability failures that made secure authentication difficult to deploy at scale. That research led to standalone hardware-bound security keys, and ultimately to the FIDO standards that now secure billions of logins worldwide.

SIROS builds directly on these lessons.

By basing wallet security on FIDO passkeys, wwWallet uses a widely deployed, phishing-resistant, user-friendly security model already embedded in browsers, laptops, hardware tokens, and mobile devices. It's a design choice that brings several advantages:

• Phishing-resistant end-to-end security

• No single point of failure; the keys never leave the secure element

• Integrated platform support across major OS vendors

• Syncable passkeys that allow seamless migration across devices

• A clear path to eIDAS HIGH assurance for wallet operations

This bridges authentication and identity in a way that aligns with both global technical standards and European regulatory goals.

SIROS Doesn’t Prioritise Cloud HSM Wallet Architectures

Several regulatory frameworks have looked to cloud-based hardware security module (HSM) clusters as a potential solution for wallet security. The appeal is understandable: certified hardware, predictable governance models, and an architecture that feels familiar to governments and large infrastructure providers. In these designs, each wallet user receives a keypair stored inside a compliant hardware module operated by the state or its trusted provider.

SIROS takes a different view. We recognise why Cloud HSMs are being proposed, but we remain cautious about their suitability for long-term, citizen-scale digital identity systems.

The Technical Overview outlines the core challenges we see in relying on Cloud HSMs for wallet architectures:

• Privacy: Centralised HSM infrastructures create correlation vectors across key usage that are difficult to mitigate.

• Scalability: Provisioning and operating enough HSM capacity for national-scale deployments is complex and costly.

• Security: Concentrating cryptographic material, even in hardware, introduces systemic risks that are hard to justify at population scale.

• Vendor dependence: Cloud HSM stacks often lock ecosystems into a single provider’s infrastructure and attestation model.

• Performance: Relying on remote HSM signing for every operation introduces latency and resource constraints.

Rather than placing all trust in a centralised hardware model, the SIROS architecture is built around a different principle: private keys stay with the user, not in infrastructure controlled by an intermediary. This decentralised, user-held approach avoids the structural limitations of Cloud HSM models while still meeting the security, privacy, and interoperability requirements of modern digital identity systems.

SIROS isn’t dismissing Cloud HSMs outright. They may solve specific, bounded problems, but we don’t view them as a viable foundation for the kind of user-centred, interoperable digital wallet ecosystem we’re working to enable.

The Web as the Identity Platform

The Internet grew on the strength of permissionless innovation: anyone could build a website or service without needing approval from a platform gatekeeper.

SIROS believes digital identity should follow the same model.

That is why wwWallet’s primary interface is a progressive web application (PWA) built on W3C standards. It requires no app store distribution, no vendor-specific SDKs, and no proprietary wallet frameworks. It works wherever the web works - on desktops, tablets, shared systems, and phones alike.

For regulators and implementers, this matters because:

• Web-first wallets behave consistently across devices

• Enforcement models become platform-independent

• Integration uses open standards (e.g., OpenID4VC, ISO/IEC 18013-5)

• Deployment is faster and avoids app distribution bottlenecks

Identity should be as accessible and global as the web itself.

What wwWallet Enables Today

SIROS aims to provide the governance, neutrality, and stewardship required to take wwWallet from a successful pilot project to a global infrastructure component. wwWallet already supports a wide range of real-world use cases described in the Technical Overview, including:

Age Verification with Privacy Preserved

Users can prove they are above a required age without revealing their birth date or name - an increasingly urgent regulatory requirement.

Human Verification

A cryptographic credential that proves “this user is a person,” helping services distinguish humans from bots without identity leakage.

Disaster and Crisis Management

Relief workers can prove affiliation from any device using only a FIDO key - supporting offline and low-connectivity scenarios.

These are immediate, deployable examples of what a web-first identity architecture makes possible.

Neutrality Is Not Optional

Identity infrastructure cannot be dependent on private platforms. The SIROS Foundation was established explicitly to provide neutral, non-corporate governance for the wwWallet ecosystem. As stated in the Technical Overview:

“The wwWallet and all its associated technology are not and will not be dependent on any single commercial company in the future.”

Neutrality ensures:

• Interoperability across jurisdictions

• A stable governance model that outlives vendors

• A predictable compliance path for regulators and governments

• Open participation for enterprises, researchers, and civil society

This is particularly relevant in Europe, where policymakers have emphasised digital sovereignty and the need for identity infrastructure built on open, transparent standards.

A Foundation for the Next Decade of Digital Trust

The world is moving toward a future where identity credentials will underpin not only online accounts but also payments, supply chains, machine-to-machine interactions, and AI-mediated agents. As Future-Proofing Digital Trust notes, identity systems must be architected to withstand the pressures of this future: cryptographic, regulatory, usability-related, and economic.

SIROS ensures the Internet has such a foundation.

By grounding digital identity in: open standards, passkey-protected security, device-independent access, zero-trust privacy design, and neutral, international governance, the SIROS ecosystem provides a sustainable path forward.

Identity must remain an open, global capability, not a proprietary feature of mobile platforms. With wwWallet as the open-source reference implementation and SIROS providing the governance and infrastructure to maintain it, we believe this is the most secure, privacy-preserving, and universally accessible approach to digital identity available today.

SIROS welcomes governments, enterprises, developers, and civil society organisations to engage through pilots, contributions to wwWallet, and participation in open standards.