Australian not-for-profit · ACN 699 651 771Open research · Open software · Public benefitPublic record

Research program 04

Identity — prove who you are without handing yourself over

VEID, the Verifiable Electronic Identity layer of VirtEngine, is decentralised protocol technology: multi-factor verification whose evidence is processed and encrypted on the user's own device, scored by chain consensus rather than a central bureau, and presented to services as proofs of attributes — not copies of documents.

Layer
VEID on the VirtEngine chain — x/veid · x/veidregistry · x/mfa · x/veid/zk
Patent
AU2024203136B2 — granted to 12 May 2044
Service
identity.org.au · wallet portal my.identity.org.au
Grounding
human-rights purpose, constitution cl 6.1.3 · consent framework

01The pipeline

Four factors in, one score out — and the evidence stays yours

Verification strength usually comes at privacy's expense: stronger checks, bigger central databases. VEID's pipeline is engineered to break that trade — evidence is captured and encrypted on-device, validators score it under consensus, and only the score becomes ledger state.

fig 01 — the VEID pipeline: capture, encrypt, score by consensus, present in zero knowledge

Multi-factor capture

The reference capture flow combines document capture with guided framing and OCR performed locally; original document images remain on the user's device and are never uploaded. The user reviews minimum derived fields before any separately approved scope submission. Selfie capture with active liveness challenges — blink, head turn, smile — and anti-spoofing signals; fingerprint or iris capture through the platform's secure biometric APIs; and device integrity attestation via Google Play Integrity or Apple App Attest, with SafetyNet and DeviceCheck fallbacks for legacy devices.

On-device processing, encrypted scopes

Only minimum user-approved document-derived fields or features may be sent in a separately consented scope; the source scan never leaves the device. Biometric templates and attestation payloads follow their separate notices and, if approved, are encrypted into the VEID envelope before anything leaves the device, and stored as consent-gated identity scopes — including dedicated scope types for biometric hardware and device attestation. Data minimisation is a design rule: only the templates and integrity metadata required for verification are stored, encrypted, with lifecycle expiration and revocation.

Consensus scoring, not a central bureau

Block-proposing validators decrypt submitted scopes with their private keys, score the evidence with machine-learning models, and write the resulting identity trust score into the proposed block; consensus validators repeat the computation and vote. No single verifier's judgement is final, and no central database of documents accumulates anywhere.

Zero-knowledge presentation

The x/veid/zk package verifies proofs about identity attributes — validity, tier, uniqueness, or a predicate like being over 18 — without placing the attributes themselves on-chain or handing documents to the relying service. Services learn the answer to their question and nothing else.

02Verification tiers

Assurance is graduated, not binary

The chain derives a tier from the identity trust score. Services ask for the tier their risk actually requires — a real-person signal for a forum is not the same question as validator onboarding.

VEID verification tiers, their evidence requirements, and what they unlock
Tier Evidence Unlocks
0 Unverified none — where every wallet starts browsing; activity that needs no identity checks
1 Basic self-entered details; a session passing the network's early checks low-risk services needing a real-person signal
2 Standard government document (front and back) + selfie with active liveness + OCR match most participating services; age and attribute proofs
3 Trusted Standard plus hardware-backed biometrics, device attestation, sustained history high-trust roles — e.g. validator onboarding; high-value transactions

Attestation-required policies apply to high-risk actions: where a device cannot support hardware attestation, the flow records that fact and verification pipelines restrict what the result may be used for.

03The service

identity.org.au — the program's public face

The Foundation stewards identity.org.au, the plain-language public website for individuals and relying services. The wallet portal is planned for the January 2027 launch window; VEID itself is decentralised validator-operated protocol technology.

What the property is

identity.org.au explains the wallet, the verification levels, consent and revocation, and what relying services can and cannot see — written for citizens, not cryptographers. Join the launch list for the planned wallet portal. identity.org.au is a community service stewarded by the not-for-profit foundation, and it is clearly labelled as not an Australian Government service.

Honest status

The wallet is a reference implementation: the open repository carries the React Native capture application (mobile/veid-capture-app) implementing the document, selfie, liveness, biometric-hardware, and attestation flows, with encryption and native ML modules as documented, pluggable extension points. We make no app-store claims and publish no user numbers — the verifiable artifacts are the code, the design documents, and the granted patent.

04Rights and consent

An identity system constrained by a human-rights clause

The identity program is the most direct expression of the foundation's third purpose: promoting privacy, dignity, autonomy, and equality of access — and protection from unlawful surveillance and private capture of essential digital infrastructure.

Constitutional grounding

The human-rights purpose cl 6.1.3 is not aspiration — it binds the design. Clause 39 mandates privacy-by-design: minimised collection, minimised central custody, encryption and selective disclosure where feasible, and independent auditability. An identity system operated under this constitution cannot lawfully drift into a surveillance instrument, because the entity running it is constitutionally barred from building one.

The consent framework

Consent in VEID is scope-based and granular: global settings, per-scope consent with purpose, expiry, and revocation timestamps, and provider-specific grants with whitelists and restrictions. The published consent framework maps the implementation (x/veid/types/consent.go) against GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, and BIPA, and a biometric data addendum sets specific commitments for biometric handling. Biometric capture requires explicit consent before anything is collected.

The patent record is public: granted Australian patent AU2024203136B2 covers the decentralized computing system including the identity-scoring blockchain control layer and on-chain multifactor authentication — held by the foundation to prevent private capture, while the implementation is published under Apache-2.0.

05Open questions

What the research stream is still working on

Identity is a research program, and its open problems are stated as such on the decentralized-identity topic page.

  • Liveness robustness against generative-AI presentation attacks
  • The recoverability/unlinkability tension in credential re-issuance
  • How relying services consume tiered scores without re-identifying users across contexts

06Go deeper

The program in the ecosystem

identity.org.au Decentralized identity research VirtEngine program Source code Patent AU2024203136B2