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from here the Team Report about the FedID FO for Digital Credentials API
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simoneonofri authored Oct 30, 2024
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### Other Threats and Harms

#### Government-issued credentials

Considering the specific case of government credentials issued to people, it is useful to think about some use cases:
- In some countries, at-risk workers who are taken abroad have their passports seized by those who exploit them so that they can be controlled. Digital Credentials can generally mitigate this as being intangible; they can be regenerated in case of theft. A further consideration is how the threat agent will act when faced with this situation and what mitigations (more process than merely technical) governments can implement.
- Normally, we assume that the _Holder_ of the credential is also the _Subject_ to whom the credential refers. This is not necessarily the case.
- One particularly useful and interesting aspect is the delegation of a credential (we use the term delegation loosely, as questions such as Guardianship have a precise legal meaning). This prevents abuse and identity theft and should be modeled properly as Issuer rules on the upper layers of the architecture.
- Also, delegation could be a crucial feature if the government generates a credential at the organizational level, which is then used by legal representatives (who are people).

#### Credentials used for authentication

Another scenario is the use of a credential for authentication:
- In contrast to what can happen with credentials in other identity models, where credentials are used primarily for authentication, it can be risky to use a credential issued by an issuer to authenticate to a service that is not under the control of the issuer, as a malicious issuer could generate a parallel ad-hoc credential to authenticate. For example, it may not be a good idea to log into your personal e-mail with a government-issued credential such as a passport.

Other threats that [must be considered](https://github.com/w3c/identity-web-impact/issues/29#issuecomment-2309436586):
Other threats [to consider](https://github.com/w3c/identity-web-impact/issues/29#issuecomment-2309436586):
- Identity leakage
- Identity impersonation

#### Societal Threats

Other threats [to consider](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-review-comments/2024Sep/0017.html) as specified in the [Team report on Federated Identity Working Group Charter Formal Objection - Adding Digital Credentials API](https://www.w3.org/2024/10/team-report-fedid-wg-fo.html):
- Perpetuates sharing of personal data by making it more available via a browser API
- Increased centralization through subtle tradeoffs
- Content will be moved from the deep web to the “attributed deep web”
- Exchanges user agency for greater compliance and convenience

## What are we going to do about it?

Countermeasures/Features:
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