Stephan Engberg

Qualified Unlinkability: The Emerging Gold Standard for Trustworthy Digitalisation and innovation

Qualified Unlinkability is the primary requirement and the raison d'être of eIDAS 2.0 — and it is far more than a privacy feature. It is emerging as the gold standard for digitalisation because it aligns cybersecurity, deregulation, crime prevention, innovation and functioning market formation in a single design principle: give control back to the citizen or the employee, and lock data to the transaction rather than to the person.

Establishing verified and validated digital spaces is a hard engineering problem that demands genuinely new digital mechanisms. Drawing on project TRANSCEND, carried out under the Danish Defence, this talk shows how trustworthy security design developed for the battlefield transfers dual-use into civil society. By binding an eIDAS 2.0 hardware wallet cryptographically and directly to a Trustworthy CA in HSM hardware, we can encrypt straight through the many weak standards embedded in existing infrastructure.

The result is security that holds up in open source, strong resistance to both AI-driven and quantum-based attacks, unbureaucratic data sharing, and low-friction onboarding of new service providers into transactions. Most importantly, the shift from trusted to trustworthy digitalisation is what finally makes sovereignty and compliance by design something other than slogans.

Bio:
Stephan Engberg is founder of Priway ApS, CitizenKey and project lead for TRANSCEND under the Danish Defence. Entrepreneur and researcher specialising in security and privacy by design, digital identity, and business strategy for high-tech ventures. Over three decades of experience spanning banking, born-global start-ups, EU research programmes, healthcare and public-sector digitalisation. Frequently engaged by media and public institutions as an expert on security and digital economics, and named one of 24 international "Moral Exemplars in Good Computing" (IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2009).