Federated

Description

Volt4AI federates access and authorisation across organisational boundaries without a central authority. It uses fully decentralised identity — conforming to the W3C Decentralized Identifier (DID) spec with key, web, webvh and Volt’s own volt methods — together with a fully distributed policy definition and enforcement model, so parties in different organisations can establish trust and authorise each other directly.

Importance

Federating identity and authorisation lets independent organisations trust each other directly — avoiding central identity providers and the n² problem. Volt uses W3C DIDs and a DID registry (Volt: Identity, DID registry).

Benefit

• Lets UK, NATO, intelligence and non-traditional partners share and authorise across domains without a shared central identity provider.
• Trust attributes (e.g. key storage) are negotiated between parties at trust-establishment time.

Defence Relevance

Directly answers the DTW need to connect MOD data systems with NATO, intelligence services and partner nations across different systems and security levels. Maps to DTW Cycle 0 criterion 5 (federation of access/authorisation between organisational boundaries) and to Challenge 1 (securely sourcing and sharing data between dispersed and siloed locations). NQM states this is “supported as standard” by the distributed identity and policy model.

Civilian & Enterprise Relevance

B2B data spaces, supply-chain consortia and cross-organisation credential exchange (verifiable credentials, SSO) work without a shared central identity provider — relevant to finance, healthcare networks and research collaborations where no party will cede control of identity.

Related

• Volt4AI
• Distributed
• Signed
• Dynamic

Sources

• NQM DTW Response §Federation
• NQM DTW Response §Technical detail
• DTW Cycle 0 Challenge