ELMO2EDS: Transforming Educational Credentials into Self-Sovereign Identity Paradigm
Patrick Herbke, Hakan Yildiz
TL;DR
The paper addresses authenticating cross-border educational credentials within EMREX and proposes ELMO2EDS to map EMREX DCs into a Self-Sovereign Identity format for issuer/holder verification. It analyzes data standards, presents an open-source converter that translates ELMO-based DCs to the EDS schema used by EBSI, and discusses integration challenges and placeholders for SSI signatures. The contributions include a concrete data-transformation approach, an implementation plan, and a discussion of limitations and future integration steps toward EBSI-enabled, cross-border trust. The work advances the shift from server-centric credential exchange to user-centric, portable, verifiable study achievements in European education networks.
Abstract
Digital credentials in education make it easier for students to apply for a course of study, a new job, or change a higher education institute. Academic networks, such as EMREX, support the exchange of digital credentials between students and education institutes. Students can fetch results from one educational institute and apply for a course of study at another educational institute. Digital signatures of the issuing institution can verify the authenticity of digital credentials. Each institution must provide the integration of EMREX using its identity management system. In this paper, we investigate how digital credentials can be integrated into the Self-Sovereign Identity ecosystem to overcome the known issues of academic networks. We examine known issues such as the authentication of students. Self-Sovereign Identity is a paradigm that gives individuals control of their digital identities. Based on our findings, we propose ELMO2EDS, a solution that 1) converts digital credentials from EMREX to a suitable Self-Sovereign Identy data format, 2) enables authenticating a student, and 3) enables issuing, storing, and verification of achieved study.