SoK: Anonymous Credentials for Digital Identity Wallets

Christian Bormann; Anja Lehmann

Paper 2026/330

SoK: Anonymous Credentials for Digital Identity Wallets

Christian Bormann

, SPRIND - Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation, Germany

Anja Lehmann

, Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam

Abstract

Digital identity wallets are currently being developed around the globe, aiming to provide user-centric and secure authentication. Realizing this in a privacy-preserving manner is paramount, and even mandated in Europe which is developing the European Digital Identity Wallet with planned release in 2026. Current proposals to build these wallets are based on classic signature schemes such as ECDSA, but would benefit greatly from the use of anonymous credentials. Thus, there is currently a strong interest in developing the necessary standards to bring these cryptographic concepts into the real world. This work aims to inform ongoing standardization eﬀorts by providing an overview of the mostprominent solutions, and the remaining open challenges. We split our overview among two fundamental architectural approaches: (1) dedicated multi-message signature schemes that allow for eﬃcient ZKPs, and (2) general-purpose ZKPs used on top of legacy ECDSA. We also provide a comprehensive summary of the broad feature set that anonymous credentials can provide for identity wallets, in order to demonstrate that upgrading to these systems is a worthwhile endeavor and help to design standards that can leverage the rich existing body of work.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Minor revision. Security Standardisation Research (SSR) Conference 2025
Keywords: Anonymous Credentials EUDI Zero-knowledge Proofs Digital Identity Digital Wallets
Contact author(s): christian bormann @ eudi sprind org
anja lehmann @ hpi de
History: 2026-02-22: revised; 2026-02-19: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2026/330
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/330,
      author = {Christian Bormann and Anja Lehmann},
      title = {{SoK}: Anonymous Credentials for Digital Identity Wallets},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/330},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/330}
}