LIGHTest Cross-Domain Trust Infrastructure Demonstration

A major challenge of digitalization is trust, especially when it comes to verifying and evaluating various levels or types of electronic transactions in a secure, interoperable, and user centric manner. Trust is interconnected to and supported by, yet also challenged by e.g. restrictions or legislative requirements, national laws, which lead to ad hoc solutions within the public, private, and non-government sectors. This increasingly creates incompatible ‘silos’ that make global cooperation difficult. 

The LIGHTest cross-domain infrastructure provides the technical means to build bridges between these ‘silos’, fostering the use of digital trust in a global setting and making international and inter-sectorial cooperation more secure and reliable. As transactions and agreements between two entities are increasingly shared through digital means, it is crucial that these electronic transactions can be verified and translated on a trusted infrastructure.

For the UNHCR the project demonstrated and evaluated how the LIGHTest trust infrastructure could support and improve the digitalization process of documents to help prevent fraud, loss of documents and improve accessibility and secure transfer of documents between stakeholders such as UNHCR, universities and refugees.

In the same time, this technology could empower refugees by enabling them to have direct access to their identity documents and education certificates, as well as access to their personal data. This would substantially ease and streamline their scholarship application in tertiary education, but would also empower them in their interactions with employers, universities, and various other institutions and stakeholders.

Going beyond the DAFI Scholarship Programme, a UNHCR Trust Scheme could potentially be applied on a larger scale among the UNHCR databases between various UNHCR operations while also enabling cross-organizational application scenarios. 

The result of the cooperation was the development of a proof of concept UNHCR Trust Scheme Prototype together with a Trust Scheme Demonstrator with focus on the DAFI Scholarship Programme for education; also adaptable for a global, organization level use in other identity management related use cases.

DISCLAIMER

The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of Fraunhofer and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of UNHCR.