OpenID Foundation Urges Australia to Prioritize Credential Interoperability

The OpenID Foundation has urged Australia to make interoperability the central design priority as the country builds out its verifiable-credentials framework, warning that the choices made now will shape whether the resulting system connects across services or fractures into silos.

The standards body’s Australian Digital Trust Community Group submitted the response to a Department of Finance consultation seeking input on policy and regulatory settings for Commonwealth use of verifiable credentials, including a proposed Commonwealth VC Trust Framework. The consultation follows Australia’s broader push to expand its Digital ID System, which the government committed $654.3 million over four years to grow, and builds directly on an earlier consultation the department opened on Commonwealth verifiable-credentials policy.

Verifiable credentials are digital versions of documents such as licenses or qualifications that can be issued, held in a digital wallet and presented to a third party, with the receiving party able to cryptographically confirm the credential is genuine and unaltered without contacting the original issuer. The submission points to the OpenID Foundation’s existing open standards as candidates already available to underpin the Australian Government Digital ID System. OpenID for Verifiable Presentation and OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance govern how a digital wallet shares and receives credentials, while OpenID Connect, FAPI 2.0, OpenID Federation and Shared Signals cover broader identity and security plumbing.

The foundation also recommends the government draw on its freely available, open-source conformance-testing tools rather than building bespoke test suites, and flags a credential-issuance self-certification program it plans to launch later this year as a way for vendors to demonstrate compliance without a lengthy bespoke review. Conformance testing checks that a given wallet or issuer implementation actually follows the published standard correctly, rather than a vendor’s own interpretation of it.

“The choices made now will determine whether Australia develops a single interoperable credential ecosystem or a collection of disconnected silos,” said John Scullen, co-chair of the Australian Digital Trust Community Group. The OpenID Foundation is the nonprofit standards body behind OpenID Connect, the login protocol underlying “sign in with” buttons used across much of the web, and has spent the past several years extending that work into verifiable credentials and digital wallets.

Sources: OpenID Foundation

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By Cass Kennedy