Swiss e-ID
A six-month federal contract to architect the base infrastructure of the Swiss e-ID, including its cryptography and content-encryption concepts — with the result published for anyone to scrutinise.
In early 2024 the Swiss federal government was laying the technical groundwork for a national electronic identity. I spent six months under contract to BIT — the Federal Office of Information Technology, Systems and Telecommunication — architecting the base infrastructure of the Swiss e-ID, including its cryptography and content-encryption concepts.
The work was as much about challenging as designing: reviewing the architectures of adjacent workstreams, pressing on the assumptions behind them, and making sure the pieces fit into one coherent trust infrastructure rather than several. I co-authored the resulting discussion paper, which the federal government released for public scrutiny and comment.
That last part is the part I like. A national identity system only earns trust if strangers can read exactly how it is meant to work and argue with it — in public, before it ships. The paper is still there, in the open, with its German and French versions alongside.
Self-sovereign identity is a field where the cryptography is the easy half. The hard half is the boundary between what the state must be able to verify and what it must never be able to see. Getting that boundary right, in a document other people can attack, is the kind of problem I would take again.