GlobalPlatform Technology:
The Cornerstone of Trust andInteroperability for theEuropean Union Digital Identity
WalletWhite Paper
February 2023
GP_WPR_141

eID Wallet Task Force© 2023 GlobalPlatform. All rights reserved.

Contents
Executive Summary ................................................................................................................................................ 3
The European Union Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet ................................................................................................ 3
Overview of EUDI Wallet .................................................................................................................................... 3
GlobalPlatform Secure Components and the EUDI Wallet Framework ............................................................. 5
The EUDI Wallet Trustworthiness: Assurance Levels ....................................................................................... 6
GlobalPlatform ........................................................................................................................................................ 7
GlobalPlatform Core Technologies ..................................................................................................................... 7
GlobalPlatform Secure Elements ............................................................................................................................ 8
Overview of Secure Elements............................................................................................................................. 8
Embedded Secure Elements .............................................................................................................................. 9
Embedded UICC ............................................................................................................................................... 10
GlobalPlatform Interoperable Framework for Accessing and Managing Secure Elements.............................. 11
GlobalPlatform Certification .................................................................................................................................. 12
GlobalPlatform SESIP Methodology ..................................................................................................................... 12© 2023 GlobalPlatform, Inc. All rights reserved.

2

Executive Summary
The European Union Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet is a new digital identity solution on mobile devices
that will provide a secure and convenient way for citizens to prove and share identity information
throughout Europe. The EUDI Wallet will be used to access a wide range of online and offline
services and transactions across the European Union. As such, it is important that the EUDI Wallethas been thoroughly tested and found interoperable, secure, and reliable.
GlobalPlatform has successfully developed several technologies for creating trustworthy devices anddigital services and has demonstrated their interoperability. These technologies are available on thevast majority of mobile phones and can provide the foundations for trust and interoperability of the
EUDI Wallet, regardless of the underlying wallet attribute or data model.
The compliance program of GlobalPlatform ensures the interoperability of its secure components,
which are deployed on a range of form factors that can fit different needs of EUDI Wallet
implementations.
GlobalPlatform supports the industry by developing generic security protection profiles per type of
product and has developed several protection profiles for Common Criteria certification of Secure
Components to demonstrate their high level of security. As such, GlobalPlatform technology will
enable EUDI Wallet implementations to support the highest assurance security requirements when
the ENISA certification scheme for the EUDI Wallet is defined.
GlobalPlatform technology is widely used in the identity segment and mobile phone security and will
most likely play a major role in the EUDI Wallet. GlobalPlatform is committed to support the future of
Digital Identity and is looking forward to help successfully implement and deploy the EUDI Wallet, as
well as participate in defining security requirements and architecture, and develop technical andinteroperability specifications for a better standardization of the Wallet if needed. GlobalPlatform
technology can help decision makers meet the security challenges required by an ambitious project
like the EUDI wallet, and give options to regulators based on GlobalPlatform experience.

The European Union Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet
Overview of EUDI Wallet
In June 2021, the European Commission adopted a new proposal for a Regulation on a European
Digital Identity, eIDAS 2, which is an evolution of the 2014 eIDAS (electronic IDentification,
Authentication and trust Services) regulation that laid down the necessary foundations to safely
access services and carry out transactions online and across the borders of the European Union.
With this new regulation, each of the twenty-seven member states will have to issue a digital identity
wallet with a scheme recognized and accepted by the other member states, built on common
technical standards, and with early pilots in 2024.
The objective of this new regulation is to ensure universal access for people and businesses tosecure and provide trustworthy electronic identification and authentication using a personal digitalwallet on a mobile phone.

© 2023 GlobalPlatform, Inc. All rights reserved.

3

The EUDI Wallet will provide citizens a secure and convenient way to prove their identities and shareidentity information with public and private online and offline services throughout Europe. This Walletis intended to be a mobile-first system, meaning that it will primarily be accessed through mobile
devices such as smartphones. The Wallet will be issued by member states or entities under theircontrol, and it will allow users to select and share verifiable attributes with relying parties. The
attributes shared online or offline will be under the sole control of the user. The EUDI Wallet will also
allow for qualified electronic signatures, which can be used to electronically sign documents andtransactions, as well as provide strong user authentication for online services.
GlobalPlatform provides widely accepted technologies that already enable high security for mobile
devices, electronic identity documents, and applications—technologies that can bring trust,interoperability, and security to the EUDI Wallet.

Who is GlobalPlatform
GlobalPlatform is a member-driven organization that develops frameworks for creating
trustworthy devices and digital services, including technologies found in mobile devices, suchas secure elements and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). GlobalPlatform coretechnologies are used to secure billions of mobile phone devices, electronic identity
documents, payment cards, and other devices, and are very much relevant to the European
Union Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet.
GlobalPlatform develops and publishes functional and security specifications around thesecore technologies and maintains certification programs to ensure that products and services
using these technologies meet certain standards. GlobalPlatform has over 90 member
companies and works with a network of 11 accredited labs and 68 test suites to ensure theinteroperability and security of its technologies.
GlobalPlatform’s goal is to create a Chain of Trust that protects both devices and digital
services, and to provide service providers with the tools and frameworks they need to build
secure and trustworthy systems.

© 2023 GlobalPlatform, Inc. All rights reserved.

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GlobalPlatform Secure Components and the EUDI Wallet Framework
The European Commission mandated the eIDAS expert group to develop a Toolbox, including an
Architecture Reference Framework (ARF), to define common standards and specifications of the
EUDI Wallet. Among other things, the ARF defines the roles, actors, and interfaces of the EUDI
Wallet, as well as the underlying data models.
GlobalPlatform technologies are generic and already used to secure various applications on mobile
phones, such as payment, connectivity, and digital car keys. Whenever the member states orimplementer chooses to build an ARF-compliant wallet, GlobalPlatform can provide an interoperable
and certifiable security foundation. In particular, GlobalPlatform can support any chosen attribute ordata model, such as the one defined in ISO/IEC 18013-5/23220 or the W3C Verifiable Credentials
Data Model specification.
Besides mobile application security, GlobalPlatform also provides secure protocols to remotely
provision and manage sensitive applications and data, as well as update and maintain security ofthese applications on the field. These protocols will provide EUDI Wallet applications end-to-end
security to provision the applications, sensitive data, and cryptographic material used by the EUDI
Wallet.
GlobalPlatform secure components are certifiable for hosting sensitive applications and data of the
EUDI Wallet. GlobalPlatform also operates a compliance program to ensure interoperability of securecomponents. GlobalPlatform secure components are used in several certification schemes to thehighest level of security, including GlobalPlatform’s own security certification schemes.
GlobalPlatform’s interoperability, compliance program, and certifiable components provide national
and European authorities an approach to both interoperability and security certification.

GlobalPlatform Certification Program© 2023 GlobalPlatform, Inc. All rights reserved.

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The EUDI Wallet Trustworthiness: Assurance Levels
The ambitious scope of use cases for the EUDI wallet, the wide range of services it is meant tosupport, as well as the sensitive nature of its contents, call for a careful design and testing of its
security and reliability. In this sense, the European Commission proposes its certification to a highlevel of security.
The EUDI Wallet will be used to access a wide range of online and offline services and transactions.
As such, it is important that it has been thoroughly tested and found to be secure and reliable. The
concept of level of assurance is often used to evaluate the security of a product, and the European
Union Cybersecurity Act defines three assurance levels for certification schemes as high, substantial,
and basic. 1
The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) is responsible for defining the certification
schemes for a particular technical domain, such as 5G or Cloud, and will be in charge of defining thecertification scheme of the EUDI Wallet.
The secure storage of sensitive wallet data, as well as the storage and execution of cryptographic
material, will most likely require a high level of assurance as defined in the EU Cybersecurity Act.
Whenever the EUDI Wallet certification scheme is published, GlobalPlatform secure components will
be able to meet the highest assurance security requirements as is already the case in other domains.
GlobalPlatform has defined Protection Profiles for Secure Elements and Trusted Execution
environments. These Protection Profiles help define the security of secure components and will
enable the certification of the wallet-secure components as soon as the ENISA Wallet certification
scheme is defined.
For example, GlobalPlatform secure elements are already certified under the EUCC Certification
Scheme levels with the AVA_VAN 5 component, and GlobalPlatform trusted execution environment
at CC levels with the AVA_VAN 3 component.
Evaluating Security Assurance
Common Criteria (CC) is an evaluation methodology that is an internationally recognized
standard for evaluating the security of information technology products. The CC certification
scheme is used to certify that IT products meet certain security requirements and can betrusted to protect against threats such as unauthorized access, tampering, or data loss.
AVA_VAN stands for "Assurance Validation and Verification Assurance Level," and it is used todescribe the level of security assurance provided by an IT product. The AVA_VAN levels range
from 1 to 5, with higher numbers indicating a higher level of security assurance.
AVA_VAN 3 indicates a basic level of security assurance, ensuring protection against attackers
with an enhanced-basic potential, while AVA_VAN 5 indicates a higher level of security
assurance, ensuring protection against attackers with a high potential. This means an IT
product that has been certified at AVA_VAN 5 has undergone a more rigorous evaluation
process and has been found to provide a higher level of security than an IT product that has
been certified at AVA_VAN 3.

The CSA levels of assurance are not to be confused with the eIDAS regulation Levels of Assurance (LoAs),
which characterize the degree of confidence in electronic identification methods.
1© 2023 GlobalPlatform, Inc. All rights reserved.

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GlobalPlatform
GlobalPlatform Core Technologies
The Secure Element, the Trusted Execution Environment, the Trusted Platform Services, and theDevice Trust Architecture are GlobalPlatform’s core technologies for creating trustworthy devices andservices. These technologies are used to secure billions of mobile phone devices, electronic identity
documents, and payment cards.

Together, these core technologies provide trust anchors for both the operating systems and forvarious use cases such as connectivity, payment, digital car keys, and digital rights management.

Answering to Mass Market Volume
Over 67+ billion
GlobalPlatform
certified SEs
are already livein the market

More than 1 billion
TEE-enabled
processors areshipped per quarter© 2023 GlobalPlatform, Inc. All rights reserved.

7

GlobalPlatform Secure Elements
Overview of Secure Elements
GlobalPlatform Secure Elements are tamper-resistant platforms used to host applications andconfidential and cryptographic data. Secure Elements are widely deployed in different form factors on
smartphones, including removable SIM cards (UICC), embedded Secure Elements (eSE), embedded
SIM (eUICC), and integrated SIM (iSIM). All these secure elements are implemented and certified
according to GlobalPlatform specifications, thus providing trust and interoperability on a wide range ofform factors.
The EUDI Wallet can benefit from the large installed base of Secure Elements to secure sensitive
data and applications in the mobile phone. Moreover, GlobalPlatform Secure Elements are also
widely deployed in electronic passports, electronic identity cards, and electronic identification
methods, and can provide secure onboarding of the user’s identity within the Wallet, or to support theWallet in achieving electronic identification and authentication, in line with the requirements of a highlevel of assurance (LoA) as defined by the EU's eIDAS regulation when the Wallet cannot rely on asecure element within the mobile phone.

Trust & Interoperability Across Form Factors

EUDI Wallet
Application

GlobalPlatform SE Protocols & Management
eSE© 2023 GlobalPlatform, Inc. All rights reserved.

eUICC

iUICC

UICC

ID
Card

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Embedded Secure Elements
Most current smartphone devices include a GlobalPlatform-compliant embedded Secure Element(eSE) that provides security to the smartphone operating system and applications. These eSEs arepart of various use cases that require a high level of security, such as payments and digital car keys.
These eSEs are certified using Common Criteria or proprietary methods to a high level of assurance,such as AVA_VAN 5, with protection profiles and schemes that vary depending on the use case,such as EMVCo for payment applications.
The EUDI Wallet developers can use eSE to host the sensitive code and data of the Wallet
application. These embedded Wallet applications, typically Java Card applets, can be certified to ahigh level of security using Common Criteria or any other scheme that will be selected by the ENISA.
GlobalPlatform developed to the extent the Secure Element Protection Profile aimed to securecomponents implementing Java Card and GlobalPlatform Card Specifications. 2
In the case of a smartphone with an embedded SE, the phone manufacturer acts as the Verification
Authority that will ultimately manage the applications loaded on the secure element. This
management can be performed directly or delegated to an external Controlling Authority.

GlobalPlatform Secure Element Application Management

GlobalPlatform Secure Element
Issuer
Application
Issuer
Application
Issuer
Application
Issuer Security
DomainEUDI
Application
EUDI Wallet
ProviderSecurity
DomainControlling
Authority
Security
DomainA GlobalPlatform Security Domain is a logical grouping of securityrelated applications and data and their associated access control. In
addition to the issuer security domain, a controlling authority cancreate service providers security domains, such as a EUDI security
domain that will host the EUDI embedded application. This flexibility
allows for new Service Providers or others to be introduced without
having to rely on untrusted entities such as an SE owner or anotherparty for service confidentiality.

2

GlobalPlatform Technology Secure Element Protection Profile, GPC_SPE_174© 2023 GlobalPlatform, Inc. All rights reserved.

9

Embedded UICC
The traditional SIM Card (UICC) is increasingly being replaced by embedded UICC (eUICC) in thesmartphone, and more recently by integrated UICC (iUICC). It is expected that eUICC and iUICC willsoon outgrow removable UICC in terms of volume.
The eUICC is standardized by the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA),
which defined the Remote Subscription Provisioning (RSP) set of specifications. RSP defines how tosecurely provision UICC with mobile network operator connectivity credentials and profiles. The
GSMA also defined a security assurance scheme, allowing the eUICC to demonstrate high resistanceto attacks. This eUICC Security Assurance (eSA) scheme is based on Common Criteria protection
profiles BSI-CC-PP-0100 and BSI-CC-PP-0089-2015.
As it is anticipated that the eUICC will be present in a vast majority of smartphones, the GSMA has
issued a new requirement specification called Secured Applications for Mobile (SAM) that allows
third-party application providers to install and manage applets on the eUICC independently of themobile network operator profiles.
GlobalPlatform will publish a SAM configuration specification to support the GSMA requirements for
SAM. This will allow service providers, such as EUDI Wallet issuers, to host the applications andsensitive data within the eUICC secure component. As with the GSMA RSP specification, the EUDI
Wallet applet and secure component can be certified to a high level of security using Common
Criteria or any other scheme selected by the ENISA.
In the case of the GSMA RSP, the GSMA operates a verification authority to verify the applet security
and authorize loading of profiles on the eUICC. In the same way, the EUDI Wallet issuance will needa Verification Authority to verify the security of the EUDI and authorize application loading, as well as
for a Certification Authority to certify EUDI Wallet applets loaded onto the eUICC.

Secured Applications for Mobile
Mobile Phone
EUDI wallet
Application

eUICC
EUDI
Application
EUDI Wallet
Issuer Security
DomainLocal Applet
Assistant…

Service
ProviderApplication
Service
ProviderSecurity
DomainSAM Security Domain

MNO
Profile 1
MNO
Profile 2

MNO Security
DomainUsing the SAM specification, an application service provider, such asa EUDI Wallet issuer, can load embedded applications in the eUICC
independently of the eUICC issuer using a specific SAM Security
Domain. The Local Applet Assistant is a helper application on themobile phone that allows management of the SAM security domain
and the SAM embedded applications.

© 2023 GlobalPlatform, Inc. All rights reserved.

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GlobalPlatform Interoperable Framework for Accessing and Managing Secure Elements
GlobalPlatform provides an interoperable and secure framework where wallet issuers can deploy,
access, and manage wallet application and sensitive data in secure elements; this framework isinteroperable and supports both secure elements in external devices such as electronic documents,
and those embedded in the smartphone, in which case embedded wallet applications can be
managed independently of the smartphone issuer.
GlobalPlatform standardized the Open Mobile API specification 3 to access the Secure Element fromselected device applications, and this API is included on all Android smartphones. This API also
includes access control specifications to restrict access to the Secure Element to only selectapplications.
For end-to-end security, GlobalPlatform also developed several secure channel protocols to manage
the lifecycle of SE, SE applications and data, as well as to allow service providers to secure serverto-secure-element communications.
EUDI Wallet applications can benefit from this interoperable framework to install secure anchors on
the secure elements as applets that will secure sensitive data and operations.
The provisioning of credentials and data for the EUDI Wallet can be secured by the management
framework of GlobalPlatform. GlobalPlatform Secure Components operating systems and applets
can be securely updated post-issuance to meet requirements of the Cybersecurity Act (CSA)
regarding security updates to maintain the security level.
GlobalPlatform’s interoperable framework is also applicable to GP compliant external electronic
passport, electronic identity cards, and electronic identification methods. As such, external electronic
passports, electronic identity cards, and electronic identification devices can be accessed securely
using GlobalPlatform secure channel protocols by the Wallet application, providing end-to-end
security with backend servers, for use cases such as electronic identification, authentication, andonboarding within the Wallet.

End-To-End Security with
GlobalPlatform Management Framework

3

GlobalPlatform Technology Open Mobile API Specification Version 3.3, GPD_SPE_075© 2023 GlobalPlatform, Inc. All rights reserved.

11

GlobalPlatform Certification
GlobalPlatform operates functional certification programs, enabling stakeholders to verify productadherence to the association’s technical specifications and market-specific configurations, andultimately to ensure complete interoperability across suppliers. As such, it ensures a large panel ofsuppliers, avoiding any vendor lock-in. This certification program is supported by several
organizations such as ETSI, GSMA, and EMVCo for connectivity or payment use cases.
GlobalPlatform supports the industry by developing generic security protection profiles per type of
product and based on industry needs. 4 In particular, GlobalPlatform has developed a protection
profile for Common Criteria certification of Secure Elements to demonstrate their high level of
security. GlobalPlatform technology, having met the highest levels of assurance for the security
schemes of different market segments such as payments and telecommunications, can surely
provide the trust architecture needed by regulators like ENISA to bring the highest assurance to the
EUDI wallet.

GlobalPlatform SESIP Methodology
GlobalPlatform developed the SESIP evaluation methodology, a flexible and efficient security
evaluation methodology to address the unique complexities and challenges of the evolving Internet ofThings (IoT) ecosystem. SESIP is a candidate to become a European Norm (EN) under
CEN/CENELEC.
Although SESIP focuses on the IoT platform, it can be extended to certify a device by adding specificbusiness-related features in an SESIP Profile. As such, the SESIP methodology can provide thebasis for certification by composition of complex applications such as the EUDI Wallet. The SESIP
flexible composition model can simplify the certification by composition of whole or part of the EUDI
Wallet.

4

For example, GlobalPlatform SE, TEE, and MCU protection profiles.

© 2023 GlobalPlatform, Inc. All rights reserved.

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