The Swiss digital identity (e-ID) has been under public scrutiny since its narrowly approved referendum. Public trust in a secure, government-provided digital identity is considered the foundation of the project. However, it has emerged that the federal administration was secretly pursuing an outsourcing strategy for this critical infrastructure. As the magazine Republik reveals, the Federal Office of Justice and the Federal Office for Information Technology and Telecommunication planned to contract Amazon Web Services (AWS) for key tasks related to the e-ID trust infrastructure in the spring.
According to the report, the planned involvement of the US hyperscaler concerned a core component of the system: the trust infrastructure, which ensures the authenticity of digital IDs and the authorization of requesting companies and authorities. This includes the basic register, which manages the status of an e-ID in anonymized form, as well as the publicly accessible trust register for authorized issuers and verification services.
AWS apparently convinced the authorities primarily due to the extremely high reliability of its data centers, which must be guaranteed around the clock. Since the agreed-upon state cloud infrastructure is delayed, IT managers saw using existing framework agreements with international providers as a pragmatic solution. The Federal Office of Justice confirmed to Republik that all technical options had been examined as part of the preparatory work.
