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Digital Identities - Mobile Driver's License (mDL)

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) is helping to accelerate the adoption of standards and best practices for mobile driver’s licenses. Compared to physical driver’s licenses, mDLs have capabilities that make them easier to use with online and digital transactions to prevent fraud, identity theft, and unauthorized access.

Recognizing the value of mDLs for business as well as for government applications, organizations seeking to adopt mDLs are collaborating in a consortium at NCCoE with technology vendors, government agencies, regulators, and standards bodies. The goal is to demonstrate real world business use cases, integrating mDLs with commercially available technology and into business processes. 

Project Description 2-Page Fact Sheet

NCCoE Project Use Cases

To realize the full value of mDLs, collaboration is needed to mature standards, best practices, and protocols that safeguard user data while promoting adoption of mDLs. That’s why the NCCoE has brought together stakeholders from across the mDL ecosystem to build out a reference implementation to promote standards and best practices for mDL deployments and to address adoption challenges. (See list of consortium participants below.) Over the next couple of years this project will address several use cases. The first addresses ‘Know Your Customer/Customer Identification Program Onboarding and Access,’ which will demonstrate the use of an mDL and/or Verifiable Credentials (VC) for establishing and accessing an online financial account.
Status: Reviewing Comments

The NCCoE has published NIST SP 1800-42A, Digital Identities - Mobile Driver’s License (mDL): Accelerating Development and Adoption of Digital Identity for Financial Institutions. The public comment period for the publication has closed. 

NIST SP 1800-42A: Digital Identities Mobile Driver’s License (mDL) – Accelerating Development and Adoption of Digital Identity for Financial Institutions (Initial Public Draft)Document Version NIST SP 1800-42A: Digital Identities Mobile Driver’s License (mDL) – Accelerating Development and Adoption of Digital Identity for Financial Institutions (Initial Public Draft)

Use Case 2: ‘Government Credential Service Providers’ will demonstrate the use of an mDL and/or Verifiable Credentials (VC) with federal and state government services. Check out the mDL supporting resources site to see the latest resources under this effort.

mDL Supporting Resources SiteWeb Version mDL Supporting Resources Site

Why mDLs?

mDLs function much like a traditional driver's license, carrying information such as name, date of birth, and address but in a digital format accessible through a dedicated mobile application, often referred to as a digital wallet. Compared to physical driver’s licenses, mDLs have several capabilities that make them easier to use with online and digital transactions:

  • mDLs are underpinned by public key cryptography, making the credential cryptographically verifiable.
  • mDLs can be integrated natively with device biometrics for user verification.
  • mDLs can communicate natively between two mobile applications but also in cross device flows between mobile applications and the web browser on a laptop or tablet.
  • mDLs offer the potential for selective disclosure, allowing users to pick and choose which information to share with third parties.

Transactions at financial institutions, healthcare providers, government services, and many other organizations could benefit from enhanced customer experiences, more accurate identity verification, and reduced fraud if they supported mDLs.

Challenge: Credential compromise and online fraud are significant issues in today's cyberthreat landscape, as traditional methods of online identity verification, including mDLs, are increasingly vulnerable. The effectiveness of these methods is undermined by new technologies like AI-generated images and the ability of malicious actors to access necessary information.

Consortium Participants

Organizations participating in this project submitted their capabilities in response to an open call in the Federal Register for all sources of relevant security capabilities from academia and industry (vendors and integrators). The following respondents with relevant capabilities or product components (identified as “Technology Partners/Collaborators” herein) signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement to collaborate with NIST in a consortium to build this example solution.

Additional Resources

Interested in attending upcoming mDL events, watching a recording of a recent mDL webinar, or reading our blog posts? Use the buttons below to view a list of mDL events or our latest blog post.

View mDL Events Read our latest blog post
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A Community of Interest (COI) is a group of professionals and advisors who share business insights, technical expertise, challenges, and perspectives to guide NCCoE projects. COIs often include experts, innovators, and everyday users of cybersecurity and privacy technologies. Share your expertise and consider becoming a member of this project's COI. 

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