Age-verification without leaking birth date

This article describes the process of how to create a Legal Identity that can be used to demonstrate you have reached a certain age, without having to disclose your actual birth date. This is an important mechanism to protect the integrity of personal information, especially if the person is a child.

Creating a Preview ID application

The first step is to create a Preview Legal Identity application containing sufficient personal information so that the age can be verified. This application will have to contain sensitive personal information, including birth date. But creating a Preview application ensures the data is not stored in a searchable database or logs. Instead it is stored in encrypted form, and only during the process to validate the information. Once the preview application has been validated, a new application can be created, containing a subset of the sensitive information, and once that is completed, the sensitive information will be removed.

The personal data necessary to include in the Preview application is:

Property	Description
BDAY	Birth Day
BMONTH	Borth Month
BYEAR	Birth Year
AGEABOVE	Age above the stated number of years

Creating real ID application

Once the Preview application has been approved, a new, real ID application is made. This new application has to have a reference to the Preview application, and should only contain a subset of the properties. At a minimum, the following properties should be included:

Property	Description
PREVIEW	Reference to the earlier Preview application.
AGEABOVE	Age above the stated number of years

Once this application has been approved, the sensitive personal information will be removed as the preview application is deleted.

Proving your age

Proving your age is as simple as performing a Quick Login with the new identity. If property filters are used, include the AGEABOVE property. As the new identity contains a reduced set of information, and no birth-date (if it was removed in the second step above), only the AGEABOVE property is received, together with proof the Neuron has validated the claim.

How to set AGEABOVE

The AGEABOVE property should not be set to the age of the user, as that can leak personal information. Instead, it should be set to a legal limit required for one or more specific purposes. If there’s an age requirement in a country for a particular purpose, that age should be encoded in the AGEABOVE property. The property will be accepted if the personal information provided in the preview can be validated, and the age of the person deduced is at or above the indicated number.

As there are different age limits for different purposes and countries (for instance, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20 and 21 are common limits), the site that tests the age of a user should not expect the number to be a specific value. Instead, it should expect the number to be at least a specific number. If there’s an age requirement for a service of 16 years of age, identities with any number for AGEABOVE greater or equal to 16 should be accepted as proof ther person is at least 16 years old.

#new, #neuron, #features, #id, #security, #privacy

Validating Electronic Travel Documents & ICAO PKI Certificates

When validating electronic Travel Documents, applications need to validate against corresponding issuer certificates not managed by the operating system. To do that, the application needs to get access to these certificates somehow, and build custom X.509 chains during validation. To avoid having such an application to embed the entire list of all these issuer certificates, a list which also get regularly updated, a new repository and package is available that publishes these certificates on Neurons where the package gets installed. Applications can easily check with the corresponding neuron and download the required certificates, based on the Authority Key Identifiers available in the Electronic Travel Document certificates.

Information about the ICAO PKI Certificate package
Package	IcaoPkiCertificates.package
Installation key	vAa0l/iFHVogQYUzm+Zs6qPsw+7lYrnyFn4MNAGA7+Gso442gJJMKjknHqka/YjM6gZZSS65HL8Adbfba1067a1a27163b905869469d6f0d
More information	https://github.com/Trust-Anchor-Group/IcaoPkiCertificates

#features, #id, #kyc, #neuron, #api, #repository, #package, #new

Remote Login API

Since Build 2025-12-30, extended in Build 2025-12-31, a new API called the Remote Login API is available on the TAG Neuron®. It is a complement to the Quick Login API, in the following ways:

• The Quick Login API is initiated by the client itself, for instance, by scanning a QR-code, clicking a link or logging in to a web site, for instance.

• The Remote Login API on the other hand, is initiated by a remote service, that wants to use the digital identity of the user in a second (or multi) factor authentication process (2FA, or MFA).

• The Quick Login API allows anonymous access (on the HTTP resource level), while the Remote Login API requires authorized access. This authorized access can be granted using WWW-Authenticate or Mutual TLS (mTLS). Mutual TLS is recommended, as it avoids the use of passwords. In both cases, the administrator of the Neuron providing access to the API needs to create a corresponding user and grant the user the corresponding privileges. (See the API documentation for details.)

#new, #api, #neuron, #security, #id

Simulating Identity and Signature Petitions

A new ComSim simulation called LegalIdentities.xml simulates a series of XMPP-connected devices that apply for digital identities, and automatically respond to identity and digital signature requests. This simulation can be used for test purposes, to test function and load, as well as measure performance. It can also be used during development of other services interacting with users of digital identities for the purposes of Multi-Factor authentication. By using the digital identities of the simulated users, automatic signatures are created, which simplifies the development life-cycle, as the developer does not need to manually sign each time the MFA procedure takes place.

Report

To review the simulation model, check out the XML definition. It contains references to both the XMPP and XMPP Legal modules of ComSim. Each actor checks if they have a digital identity. If not, the actor applies for a new simple digital identity. From Build 2026-01-07 of the Neuron®, such digital identities are automatically approved. Once such approved digital identities exist, the actors stochastically send identity and signature petitions to each other. They also accept each other’s petitions automatically. This means that they will approve external requests also. This allows them to be used for other purposes as well, as mentioned earlier. You can use this simulation together with integration of the QuickLogin API and RemoteLogin API for instance.

Also review the full report generated by one simulation of the model, for more information.

#new, #comsim, #simulation, #id, #tagsign

Custom Event Sinks

From Build 2026-01-06 the IoT Gateway now supports configuration of custom Event Sinks in the gateway.config file. On the TAG Neuron, the contents of this file is editable, via the corresponding data source. From the Sources & Nodes menu in the administrative panel, the data source Gateway configuration now contains a new node called EventSinks:

Adding custom event sinks

By selecting the EventSinks node, and pressing the Add button, you can add new event sinks. The options available depend on what services are hosted on the Neuron:

Default Event Sink Types

The following event sink types are available by default, at the time of writing:

• Event Filter allows you to filter out a subset of events of interest. The Event Filter sink then passes it on to child-sinks, which propagate them in accordance with their instructions.

• MQTT Event Sink propagate incoming events to a topic on an MQTT broker.

• Pipe Event Sink forwards events to an operating system Pipe, allowing another process on the machine access to the events.

• TCP/IP Socket Event Sink sends the logged events via TCP/IP to a remote machine.

• Text File Event Sink stores events in text files. By including date and time tags in the file name, a sequence of files can be generated. The event sink also automatically delete old files.

• WebHook Event Sink forwards events to an external source using POST. The protocol used depends on the URI scheme used by the Callback URI. The WebHook Event Sink can also collect and group events together, for easier processing on the recipient side.

• XML File Event Sink records events into XML files. Date and Time tags in the filename allow you to create a sequence of XML files generated. Old files are automatically deleted.

• XMPP Event Sink sends logged events to an XMPP recipient. Child Nodes

#new, #features, #neuron, #gateway