SOTERIA relies on a co-creation approach: citizens from Spain, Austria, and Romania have been involved at every step of SOTERIA’s platform development through surveys, focus groups, and interviews. A first round of interviews has been conducted at the early stages of the project, to evaluate citizens’ needs and expectations regarding SOTERIA. A second round of interviews has been conducted to get feedback on SOTERIA’s first prototype, based on a video introducing SOTERIA’s concept. Finally, a third round assessed citizens’ specific needs on the three project use-cases: e-voting, e-health, and e-exam.
In parallel with assessing citizens’ expectations regarding SOTERIA, technical developments for the platform have been initiated. Specifications have been defined, including as many as possible of citizens' and eIDAS regulation requirements. A digital identity provider demonstrator has been developed. It relies on a secure identity verification, that integrates advanced security checks on the identity document, and biometrics verifications. The architecture of SOTERIA digital data wallet has been designed, including a digital data vault to protect data at rest, and the privacy tools needed to control the personal information shared with the service provider and to ensure that the SOTERIA solution achieves the necessary privacy properties.
Finally, the SOTERIA digital data wallet prototype has been developed. Relying on SOTERIA’s digital identity provider and data vault, it includes the possibility to store and share data with service providers in the form of Verifiable Credentials and Verifiable Presentations, following W3C standards. To maximize the control of the citizens over its data, the data required by each service provider is clearly listed upon each connection with a new provider, and the data is shared only after the citizen has given its explicit consent. At any moment, the citizen has the possibility to revoke this consent.
SOTERIA digital data wallet has been integrated with two service providers’ platforms, demonstrating two use cases: online voting and e-exam. SOTERIA solution has been widely tested on e-exam and e-health use cases with more than 1200 citizens from Austria, Romania and Spain, across various scenarios. It mainly demonstrated the use of SOTERIA digital data wallet to securely authenticate to access to online services, and the possibility to securely exchange data through SOTERIA (health information and e-exam certificates). Feedback from all pilot participants have been collected via surveys, and their answers analysed carefully. Overall, most participants have a increased feeling of privacy and security while using SOTERIA to perform online transactions compared to when using traditional means of authentication.
Activities have been performed to raise awareness among citizens on data privacy and security, including the development of an awareness e-training. Ethical and legal issues were closely monitored to ensure compliance of SOTERIA with fundamental ethics principles and relevant regulations.
The project’s partners are in close contact with European stakeholders involved in the definition of eIDAS 2.0 which will state the basis framework for European wallets in the future. In the years following the project, SOTERIA results will be used as the basis for developing a fully eIDAS-compliant wallet, able to be exploited as one of the EUDI wallets made available by private providers.
