Enhancing National Digital Identity Systems: A Framework for
Institutional and Technical Harm Prevention Inspired by Microsoft’s
Harms Modeling
Giovanni Corti
1,3 a
, Gianluca Sassetti
1,4 b
, Amir Sharif
1 c
, Roberto Carbone
1 d
and Silvio Ranise
1,2 e
1
Center for Cybersecurity, FBK, Trento, Italy
2
Department of Mathematics, University of Trento, Trento, Italy
3
Department of Defence Studies, King’s College London, London, U.K.
4
Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and Systems Engineering, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy
Keywords:
Identity Management, Harms Modeling, Human Rights, Institutional Path Dependence.
Abstract:
The rapid adoption of National Digital Identity systems (NDIDs) across the globe underscores their role in
ensuring the human right to identity. Despite the transformation potential given by digitization, these sys-
tems introduce significant challenges, particularly concerning their safety and potential misuse. When not
adequately safeguarded, these technologies can expose individuals and populations to privacy risks as well as
violations of their rights. These risks often originate from design and institutional flaws embedded in iden-
tity management infrastructures. Existing studies on NDIDs related harms often focus narrowly on technical
design issues while neglecting the broader institutional infrastructures that enable such harms. To fill this
gap, this paper extends the collection of harms for analysis through a qualitative methodology approach of
the existing harm-related literature. Our findings suggest that 80% of NDID-related harms are the product of
suboptimal institutions and poor governance models, and that 47.5% of all impacted stakeholders are consid-
ered High Risk. By proposing a more accurate harm assessment model, this paper provides academia and the
industry with a significant contribution that allows for identifying the possibility of NDID-related harms at an
embryonic state and building the necessary infrastructure to prevent them.
1 INTRODUCTION
Civil registration and efficient Identity Management
systems (IdMs) are essential for providing individu-
als worldwide with a legal identity as well as tack-
ling the statelessness crisis, which to this day affects
1 billion people globally (Desai et al., 2018). More
studies reveal that a quarter of all children age five
and under worldwide do not possess any form of
birth registration (UNICEF, 2020), and that half of
the African population is not registered at birth (Chin-
ganya, 2019). A legal identity is considered a human
right under Article 6 of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (United Nations, 2021), and in light of
a
https://orcid.org/0009-0006-8717-7512
b
https://orcid.org/0009-0006-2239-1913
c
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6290-3588
d
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2853-4269
e
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7269-9285
the previously mentioned deficiencies in guarantee-
ing this right on a global scale, the attention of gov-
ernments worldwide has turned to the capabilities of
digital IdMs in achieving greater access to identifica-
tion. The adoption of digital IdMs ranges from guar-
anteeing identification and authentication to enhanc-
ing security across technological infrastructures, but
also to simplifying the user experience in a wide range
of web applications and online services (Bertino and
Takahashi, 2010). Today, the adoption of National
Digital Identity systems (NDIDs) allows for easy ac-
cess to governmental services and applications both
online and offline with a uniform user experience. As
of 2022, at least 186 nations worldwide (out of 198)
have adopted NDIDs.
1
Adopting an NDID requires
the collection, storage, and sharing of sensible and
identifying personal data that exposes individuals–
both the direct users and the general population–to a
1
https://id4d.worldbank.org/global-dataset
Corti, G., Sassetti, G., Sharif, A., Carbone, R. and Ranise, S.
Enhancing National Digital Identity Systems: A Framework for Institutional and Technical Harm Prevention Inspired by Microsoft’s Harms Modeling.
DOI: 10.5220/0013601400003979
In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography (SECRYPT 2025), pages 723-728
ISBN: 978-989-758-760-3; ISSN: 2184-7711
Copyright © 2025 by Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
723
range of potential threats (e.g., data leak) and harms
(e.g., discrimination) (Hernández, 2024). For exam-
ple, in January 2018, the world’s biggest ID database
was breached, exposing the identities and biomet-
ric information of more than 1 billion Indian citi-
zens (World Economic Forum, 2019). As a conse-
quence, NDIDs’ increased adoption is just as signifi-
cant as the controversies that they have raised (Center
for Human Rights and Global Justice (NYU), 2022).
The role of stakeholders is an important consider-
ation that is too often disregarded in the NDIDs dis-
course. Individual users, service providers, institu-
tions, and the general public are all to some extent af-
fected by NDIDs. A comprehensive Harms Modeling
strategy involving all stakeholders is essential to avoid
incomplete impact assessments. Without broad rep-
resentation, harms can extend beyond data breaches,
affecting societal institutions, reinforcing power im-
balances, and intensifying existing disparities. For
example, marginalized communities may be subject
to disproportionate surveillance or biased profiling as
a result of system design flaws or even underlying in-
stitutional biases (The Institute on Stalessness and In-
clusion, 2020).
To the best of our knowledge, the current litera-
ture presents the following gaps: (i) There is no com-
prehensive survey of NDID-related harms around the
world. (ii) Most existing studies only focus on NDID-
related harms caused by technological flaws, and lim-
ited attention is instead given to the suboptimal insti-
tutional infrastructures that enable them. (iii) There
is a lack of analysis of the causes of each harm. (iv)
There is no framework other than Microsoft’s (Mi-
crosoft Corporation, 2022) for harm assessment of
emerging technologies, and even in Microsoft’s case,
its limitations lead to underrepresentation of all im-
pacted stakeholders and inaccurate assessment of po-
tential harm.
To address these gaps, this paper extends Mi-
crosoft’s Harms Modeling (Microsoft Corporation,
2022) with a detailed qualitative analysis of the roots
of harms related to NDIDs. It introduces a more ac-
curate, NDID-focused harm measurement model that
helps anticipate potential harms and captures both di-
rect and indirect harm to General End Users. Our
research provides actionable insights for harm-aware
policymaking and assessment of NDID-enabled harm
potential in emerging technology solutions. In sum-
mary, the paper provides two main contributions:
A survey and analysis of the harms related to
NDIDs, which also allows us to broaden the list
of affected stakeholders and analyze the root of
each harm.
Extend Microsoft’s Harms Modeling methodol-
ogy by integrating the extended list of new harms
and stakeholders and the root of each harm, which
provides actionable insights for assessing NDID
infrastructures.
2 BACKGROUND
To make the paper self-contained, we briefly cover
the main notions underlying IdMs, NDIDs, Harms,
Threats, and Microsoft’s Harms Modeling.
2.1 Identity Management Systems
IdMs offer identification and authentication services,
provide users with a digital identity, and allow them to
access their remote resources online. IdMs may create
large and complex infrastructures in which a number
of services (RPs) rely on the digital identity issued by
identity providers (IdPs), which in turn enroll and au-
thenticate users. In this context, NDIDs represent a
special case of IdMs that is designed to access gov-
ernmental resources. In this paper, we consider both
centralized and decentralized IdMs. In decentralized
systems, IdPs are referred to as Issuers, and RPs are
called Verifiers. Given the wider audience of NDIDs
and the sensitivity of the data and resources they han-
dle, they need to ensure a high security and privacy
profile for all users. We refer to the extended set of
NDID users as General End Users, which include all
people impacted by the deployment of NDIDs, in-
cluding indirect users (for example, the children of
parents who are denied medical assistance (Center for
Human Rights and Global Justice (NYU), 2021) or
access to welfare programs (Sawhney et al., 2021) as
a result of NDID-related harms). Among General End
Users, we highlight High-Risk stakeholders: a subset
of the General End Users category considered at risk
of experiencing disproportionate harm (e.g., stateless
people) (OpenID Foundation, Elizabeth Garber and
Mark Haine (editors), 2023).
2.2 Harms Modeling and Threat
Modeling
In this paper, we focus on harms, which, despite some
similarities, differ from threats, as highlighted in Fig-
ure 1. A threat is an event with the potential to ad-
versely impact organizational operations, assets, or
individuals (Gutierrez et al., 2006). Threats occur
through attacks exploiting one or more system vulner-
abilities. Harms are events or circumstances that neg-
atively impact stakeholders directly or indirectly in-
teracting with the system that do not necessarily occur
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Figure 1: Intersection between threats and harms.
through an attack. Harms may result from flawed sys-
tem design and the disregard of the system’s impact
on users. A perfectly secure and privacy-preserving
system may still harm its users if it violates one or
more of their rights.
An example of a threat is a denial-of-service at-
tack during which users are denied access to services
due to malfunctions in the technical infrastructure. In-
stead, a harm would be the loss of representation as a
consequence of being unable to access NDIDs.
2.3 Microsoft’s Harms Modeling and
Foundations for Assessing Harm
Microsoft’s Harms Modeling framework (Microsoft
Corporation, 2022) has been developed to assess the
harms produced by emerging technology solutions
and consists of five steps. Step (i) focuses on examin-
ing the scope, goals, and technology employed in the
project. Step (ii) describes in detail the technology
use cases, which helps the assessor identify instances
of abuse and misuse (Strohmayer et al., 2021).
Step (iii), Consider Stakeholders, identifies all
possible stakeholders, including both those directly
and indirectly impacted by the system (we refer to this
superset of users as General end users). Identification
of all individuals is crucial for a more comprehen-
sive and inclusive harm assessment. Step (iv), Assess
potential for harm, is the central part of the analy-
sis. Harms are first identified, enumerated, and sub-
sequently evaluated in function of the system design
and the impacted stakeholders. To do this, Microsoft
suggests a qualitative and collaborative approach to
better grasp the potential extent of identified harms.
One way to identify potential harms is to brainstorm
with a selection of stakeholders. We use historical
data to develop a comprehensive selection of harms
related to NDIDs and assess their impact (see Sec-
tion 3). This approach allows for a more accurate as-
sessment of potential for harm because it provides the
parties involved in the harm potential evaluation with
an extensive list of real-world cases of harms, harm
categories, and examples that help to visualize how
harm could occur.
Additionally, during step (iv), four metrics are
produced to help evaluate the potential for harm:
severity, scale, probability, and frequency. Severity
refers to the degree of harm on impacted stakehold-
ers. Scale measures the range of the harm; this could
be a single individual, a community, the broader user
base, or even the whole population itself. Finally,
Probability measures the chances of a harm being in-
flicted on stakeholders, while frequency indicates the
quantification of the repetition of a harm. The poten-
tial of each harm is carried out as a function of these
four metrics. The reader should note that Microsoft’s
framework only differentiates harm potential in three
categories: low, medium, and high. It does not ex-
plain how the potential is carried out, nor what the
threshold is between low, medium, and high poten-
tial. The assessors are thus tasked with defining their
own potential functions.
Harm potential helps weigh the effect of different
harms on stakeholders. Step (v), Build for positive
outcomes, is dedicated to interpreting the results of
the previous steps and providing solutions for miti-
gating harm potential. In our paper, we focus on steps
(iii) and (iv) as these steps are the foundation of both
Microsoft’s Harms Modeling and our adapted NDID
Harms Modeling.
3 METHODOLOGY
We propose a qualitative methodology approach, with
which we collect NDID-related harms documented
worldwide, and we interpret them in function of our
NDID Harms Modeling, based on Microsoft’s frame-
work (Microsoft Corporation, 2022).
To gather the necessary data, we conducted a
Enhancing National Digital Identity Systems: A Framework for Institutional and Technical Harm Prevention Inspired by Microsoft’s Harms
Modeling
725
Table 1: Excerpt of harms evaluation using NDID Harms Modeling. The columns that were added are highlighted in yellow.
SH stands for stakeholders.
Harm SH (Specific) SH (General) Root (Specific) Root (General) Potential
Amplification of power in-
equality
Lower classes High Risk Abuse of power, undermin-
ing of democratic and social
processes
Institutional Pit-
fall
HIGH
Identity theft Direct users General End Users Exposure of sensitive infor-
mation
Design Flaw HIGH
Denied medical assistance Vulnerable individuals High Risk Poor governance and/or de-
ployment
Institutional Pit-
fall
HIGH
Denied monetary assis-
tance
Low-income earners High Risk Poor governance and/or de-
ployment
Institutional Pit-
fall
HIGH
Overreach and Surveil-
lance
Direct users General End Users Abuse of power Institutional Pit-
fall
HIGH
No Right to an identity Marginalized communi-
ties
High Risk Unlawful procedures Institutional Pit-
fall
HIGH
survey of harms directly and indirectly produced by
NDIDs globally. Sourcing the harms from real-world
cases allows for a more fine-grained categorization
and proof of the relevance and accuracy of each harm.
We first identified the countries that had developed
and deployed NDIDs using the data provided by the
World Privacy Forum.
2
We identified the relevant
academic and gray literature on NDID-related harms
using tailored search queries on three different search
engines (Google, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex) with
state-of-the-art adverse media search tools
3
and orga-
nized the harms collected in a final selection of harms.
The queries we used were: (digital identity OR iden-
tity management OR IdM OR NDID OR NeID OR
eID) AND (harm OR risk OR problem OR issue OR
threat OR challenge OR abuse OR misuse) AND name
of country (for each country we previously identified).
We started with 83 potentially relevant sources. After
removing duplicates and selecting sources based on
their title, abstract, and content, we were left with 71
relevant sources. From these, we analyzed the ref-
erences and collected 5 additional sources for a total
of 76 sources. A complete list of sources is available
on our companion website (Corti, 2025). These in-
clude academic papers, journalistic pieces, white pa-
pers, and other relevant grey literature, and were col-
lected during the months of July and August 2024. All
sources of harms were cross-checked to assess their
validity as well as the trustworthiness of the informa-
tion they contained.
The results of our survey were then integrated into
the Harms Modeling framework. During this step,
we extended the original framework by adding new
2
https://www.worldprivacyforum.org/2021/10/national
-ids-and-biometrics
3
https://www.no-nonsense-intel.com/adverse-media-s
earch-tool
columns to support our analysis (the reader can find
them highlighted in Table 1). We added (i) a col-
umn to include the harms found during the survey,
(ii) two columns, Stakeholders (Specific) and Stake-
holder (General), for a detailed analysis of all af-
fected stakeholders, and (iii) another two columns,
Roots of harm (Specific) and Roots of harm (Gen-
eral), to trace each harm back to a specific cause.
We populated these additional columns referencing
the relevant literature and stakeholders impacted by
the harms collected during the survey (OpenID Foun-
dation, Elizabeth Garber and Mark Haine (editors),
2023; Center for Human Rights and Global Justice
(NYU), 2022). Harms were also classified accord-
ing to whether they targeted specific subsets of stake-
holders (High Risk Stakeholders), or all stakehold-
ers indiscriminately. Finally, for the evaluation of
the roots of harm, we defined two new terms: Design
Flaw and Institutional Pitfall. The former covers all
harms produced by a technological flaw in the De-
sign of the NDIDs, including flaws caused by poor de-
sign choices as well as flaws produced by the lack of
specific technologies (e.g., Privacy-Enhancing Tech-
nology, selective disclosure, anonymous revocation,
etc.). The latter incorporates all harms produced or
enabled by flawed institutional infrastructures respon-
sible for the development and deployment of NDIDs.
Examples of institutional pitfalls include (but are not
limited to) corrupt practices, inadequate data gover-
nance legislation, abuse of authority, lack of issue-
specific agencies, and lack of critical information pro-
tection infrastructures. These additions to the original
framework make up for its shortcomings, i.e., incon-
sideration of all impacted stakeholders and missing
insights into the roots of harm, and allow for holistic,
in-depth interpretations of the collected harms.
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3.1 NDID Harms Modeling
Walk-Through
The end result of our Harms evaluation (Table 1) us-
ing NDID Harms Modeling is an easy-to-interpret, vi-
sual representation of different harms, along with the
root cause for said harms, the stakeholders affected by
it, and an assessment of their potential impact. Our
example evaluation shows how NDID Harms Mod-
eling can allow for an exhaustive and accurate harm
assessment of NDIDs in real-world applications. This
provides all parties involved in the development and
deployment of emerging NDIDs with a framework
that anticipates harm potential with more accuracy
and allows them to mitigate the identified risks and
develop harm-free NDIDs.
Our Harm evaluation example (Table 1), allows
for two particular values to stand out: the percentage
of High Risk Stakeholders and the percentage of De-
sign Flaws and Institutional Pitfalls. In other words,
thanks to the addition of columns Roots of harm (Spe-
cific) and Roots of harm (General) that trace each
harm back to a specific cause, a harm evaluation
through NDID Harms Modeling highlights whether
each identified harm is caused by design flaws in the
technology or by poor governance and institutional
capacity. In real-world applications, this allows for
better assessment the potential for harm infliction on
an extended pool of stakeholders at the development
stage.
To present a real-world working example of harm
evaluation through NDID Harms Modeling, we high-
light one harm from Table 1. According to our litera-
ture review, in 2022 a technical flaw in the UK’s Na-
tional Health Service (NHS) record system inadver-
tently exposed personal and sensitive patient informa-
tion which notified domestic abusers of their’ victims
medical appointments (Oppenheim, 2022). In this
case, the lack of privacy-preserving technologies and
interoperability within the complex set-up of 32,000
different computer systems in the NHS’ infrastructure
even allowed domestic abusers to track down their
victims.
In our harms evaluation example (Table 1), we
identified this as “Exposure to Domestic Abusers”
harm, which impacts victims of domestic abusers,
which in turn, are classified as High Risk stakehold-
ers. This harm is caused by the exposure of sensitive
information, which finds its roots in a Design Flaw in
the technical architecture of the system.
In real-world scenarios like this, NDID Harms
Modeling would enable all parties involved in system
development to effectively evaluate possible negative
outcomes, anticipate potential harms, and identify all
affected stakeholders. More broadly, it would help
developers detect system flaws that might put users at
risk, while also providing a potential metric of harm
that clarifies the full scope of identified risks.
This example from our research helps grasp the
importance of step (iii) Consider Stakeholders, and
(iv) Assess Potential for Harms at the foundation of
Microsoft’s Harms Modeling and our NDID Harms
Modeling. Additionally, it highlights the need for a
thorough and all-stakeholder-inclusive evaluation of
harm potential at an early stage of emerging technol-
ogy development. An extensive harm analysis such as
the one proposed in this paper through NDID Harms
Modeling would lead to a more accurate identification
of harm potential and the development of Harm-free
NDID systems. In other words, in an ideal scenario
where an exhaustive and rigorous harm assessment
that considers all impacted stakeholders is carried out,
the only harms the users could realistically be exposed
to should be limited to unforeseeable causes, such as
zero-day exploits (for Design Flaws), and a few inher-
ent limitations of bureaucratic and institutional struc-
tures (for Institutional Pitfalls).
4 RESULTS
With our survey, we identified a total of 39 harms,
which we derived from a total pool of 76 sources. Ta-
ble 1 presents an excerpt of the results; the complete
table is listed on our website (Corti, 2025). From the
analysis of the harms, we have found that:
High-Risk Stakeholders account for an alarming
49% of all affected stakeholders, while the re-
maining 51% are General End Users.
Stakeholders (specific) sourced from the litera-
ture include pregnant women, low-income earn-
ers, lower classes, victims, minorities, vulnerable
individuals, marginalized communities, and direct
users.
Institutional Pitfalls make up 80% of all roots of
harm analyzed, while the remaining 20% are in-
stead traced back to Design flaws.
Roots of harm (specific) that we have found in-
clude (but are not limited to): exclusion from wel-
fare systems, exposure of sensitive information,
poor governance and/or deployment, discrimina-
tory processes, unlawful procedures, abuse of
power, poor technical design choices, and dis-
criminatory processes, denial of human rights, bi-
ased institutions.
Exclusion from welfare system together with Ex-
posure of sensitive information are the two most
Enhancing National Digital Identity Systems: A Framework for Institutional and Technical Harm Prevention Inspired by Microsoft’s Harms
Modeling
727
frequent Specific roots of harm.
The category with the most sources document-
ing the harms is: Infringement on human rights,
which also includes the two most extensively re-
searched harms: Exposure of Sensible Data and
Overreach and Surveillance.
34 out of 39 (87%) harms analyzed are high po-
tential (potential metric greater than 35).
16 out of the 19 (84%) harms affecting High Risk
stakeholders are high potential.
55% of harms produced by technical design flaws
and 97% of harms rooted in institutional pitfalls
are high potential.
5 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE
WORK
In this paper, we have presented a survey of harms
related to NDIDs, which is then embedded in an
adaptation of Microsoft’s Harms Modeling frame-
work. The framework enables a user-centric evalua-
tion of the impacts of NDIDs, highlighting their con-
flict with human rights and international law. The
goal of the survey is to identify and evaluate harms.
To do so, we analyzed academic and grey literature
to investigate NDIDs-related harms across the world.
Alarmingly, our results show that 80% of NDID-
related harms are the product of suboptimal institu-
tions and poor governance models and that 47.5% of
all impacted stakeholders are considered High Risk.
In future work, we plan to involve expert evalua-
tions to validate the completeness and correctness of
our qualitative findings, and we plan to investigate
the potential of institutional path dependence theory
and increasing returns dynamics in explaining the re-
sults of this research. The idea behind this approach
is to analyze the causal, self-reinforcing relation-
ship between poor governance models and suboptimal
NDIDs, even in light of better alternatives. Addition-
ally, future work will explore possible suboptimal-
to-optimal path switch-over solutions in the name of
harm-aware NDIDs.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has been partially supported by a joint
laboratory between FBK and the Italian Government
Printing Office and Mint and by project SERICS
(PE00000014) under the MUR National Recovery
and Resilience Plan funded by the European Union
- NextGenerationEU.
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