At the Identiverse 2025 session held at Mandalay Bay F on June 6, 3, key members of the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) took to the stage for a deep-dive discussion on the current state of the identity industry, the role of interoperability events, delegated authority related to AI, and support for diverse ecosystems. In this article, we summarize the main points of the session and share them with you.
OpenID Foundation (OIDF) Mission and Activities
OIDF is a non-profit open standards organization that strives to lead the community in developing secure, interoperable, and privacy-preserving identity standards that support a wide range of use cases, including login, open finance, open data, open health, digital identity, and shared signals, indirectly serving billions of users and millions of applications.
OIDF has a variety of active working groups.
- AB Connect: Responsible for the OpenID Connect and OpenID Federation specifications.
- FAPI: High-security API protection specifications for open banking, open data, and open health.
- Shared Signals: A specification described as the "nervous system" of any ecosystem.
- Digital Credentials Protocols: OpenID for Verifiable Presentation, OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance, etc.
- eKYC and IDA: Includes authority specifications used for delegated authority in AI, digital legacy, age verification, etc.
- AuthZEN: Standardization required for externalizing authorization.
- IPSE: It brings together several key specifications for enterprise use and aligns with specifications from other prominent standards bodies.
The Importance of Interoperability Events
A "huge number" of interoperability events have taken place in the past nine months, with active interoperability testing taking place on a range of specifications, including Shared Signals, OpenID Federation and OpenID for Verifiable Presentations.
These events are much more than just technical validation.
- Catalyst for adoption: Demonstrating interoperability is an opportunity to encourage vendor participation and demonstrate industry leadership. Atul Tulshibagwale, CTO, SGNL, said organizations like Gartner "are going to jumpstart this whole thing."
- Specification maturity: Having multiple vendors interoperate helps reconcile variations in interpretation of the specification and increase its maturity. Cisco Fellow Nancy Cam-Winget emphasized that this ensures "not just interoperability, but the maturity of the specification itself."
- Community Building: The event will foster a sense of community among participants and strengthen collaboration to solve common problems.
Delegated authority and AI: the new frontier
The intersection of AI and identity was one of the main topics of the session: the sudden acceleration of AI adoption with the advent of ChatGPT is giving rise to new security and privacy breaches, making identity more important than ever.
- AI threats: There have also been cases of AI agents masquerading as humans and instructing fraudulent transactions.
- Identity Roles: Nancy Cam-Winget emphasized the paramountcy of identity in AI, saying, "If you can't identify it, you can't protect it."
- New challenges: It was noted that charging for traffic generated by LLMs (large-scale language models), ensuring the identity of the LLMs themselves, and existing delegated authority use cases such as "Death and the Digital Estate" and age verification have similar requirements to AI agents.
- OIDF Initiatives: The OIDF is currently developing a white paper on AI, aiming to strengthen collaboration between the AI and identity communities to identify and address potential gaps, and is also considering establishing an AI-related community group.
Ecosystem Support: The Challenge of Global Standardization
OIDF actively supports 26 public and private sector ecosystems around the world, but faces the challenge that the proliferation of laws and regulations around the world (e.g. 160+ eID policies, 130+ data privacy laws, 90+ open banking deployments, etc.) are largely not yet tied to underlying standards.
- Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI): OIDF supports areas of DPI including digital identity, open finance, open data, faster payments, e-signature, civil registration and government services.
- Ecosystem Community Groups: The group, which Dima co-chairs, focuses on reference architectures for open banking and data, specification alignment, and decision support based on insights from other ecosystems.
- Focus on the Global South: It was emphasized that it is very important to take into account the requirements of the Global South, which accounts for 75-80% of the world's population. Natsuhiko Sakimura (Chairman of the Board of Directors of OIDF) pointed out that concepts that are taken for granted in the Global North, such as passwords, can become a mechanism for excluding them.
- Vendor Perspective: Nancy Cam-Winget explained the importance of a standardized, interoperable ecosystem from the vendor side, which makes it easier to scale products globally without country-specific adaptations.
- Cross-border interoperability: Ali Adnan(AuthleteCiting the acceleration of international money movements in financial services, Mr. Ikeda emphasized the importance of a robust ecosystem and rigorous implementation and testing of open standards.
Summary and Call for Participation
At the end of the session, the panelists delivered some powerful messages to the participants.
- "You are not alone": People with common business challenges can find a wealth of expertise and support by joining OIDF's community and working groups.
- Ease of participation: Joining the OIDF group does not require membership; simply sign a contribution agreement, and "any idea is a good idea" is welcomed.
- Rapid standardization: (In response to a question from the floor about whether standardization takes too long) The standardization process is not necessarily slow, and there are cases in which standards have been published in as little as 90 days.
The world of identity and standardization is rapidly evolving and will only become more complex with the rise of AI and a diverse global ecosystem. However, organizations like the OpenID Foundation are rising to the challenge through proactive interoperability events, delegated authority and AI research, and outreach to diverse ecosystems around the world.
If you are interested in this field,OpenID FoundationJoin us and let's shape the future of identity together.