Gimly: eSSIf-Lab, SSI, and NFC Smartcards

Gimly is participating in the European SSI infrastructure programme (eSSIf-lab), building a bridge for the implementation of NFC smartcards with secure elements as physical SSI identifiers. Our aim is to enable self-sovereign identity for both online and offline identification, authorization and access management, with a decreased dependency on the use of personal smartphones. Example use cases may include private health records (including corona test and vaccination status), eID cards with eIDAS compliant signatures, or enterprise employee authorisations, access management and transactions.

The bridge will be blockchain and did-method agnostic to allow for easy integration of SSI smartcards in any SSI solution. The smartcards hold an NFC microchip with an EAL6+ grade secure element for authentication and signing with their embedded DID and can be used for sovereign storage and selective disclosure of verifiable credentials. While the first smartcards to be supported are Tangem made-for-blockchain NFC cards, we welcome any producer of smartcards that meet the hardware, firmware, and security requirements for SSI functionality in our open-source project.

Open source, ecosystems, and collaboration are the drivers in SSI and in our NFC bridge. We are looking forward to collaborating with Sphereon, our partners in SSI, and with all participants in the eSSIf-lab programme or other partners in the SSI ecosystem to ensure compatibility of the NFC bridge with their SSI stack.

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