Partner Onboarding

Partner onboarding converts a public integration concept into an approved, testable, and operational trust relationship. It establishes roles, environments, credentials, trust profiles, security responsibilities, support, and evidence before production access is granted.

Onboarding stages

1. Qualification and use-case definition

The parties identify:

• intended service and user population;
• issuer, holder, verifier, relying-party, controller, and processor roles;
• jurisdictions and sector obligations;
• credential types and minimum claims;
• expected transaction volume and criticality;
• assurance and availability requirements;
• production decision owners.

The outcome is a bounded use case, not a general authorization to access every UbID capability.

2. Governance and responsibility agreement

The partner and UbID team define:

• claim ownership and issuing authority;
• lawful purpose and data responsibilities;
• credential and verification policy owners;
• incident, support, and escalation contacts;
• key, certificate, and client lifecycle responsibility;
• retention, deletion, and individual-rights procedures;
• change, suspension, and termination conditions.

Where one organization performs multiple roles, those responsibilities should still remain explicit.

3. Architecture and security review

The integration is reviewed for:

• trust boundaries and data flows;
• authentication and authorization;
• minimum disclosure and retention;
• credential, key, and status lifecycle;
• replay and transaction binding;
• dependency and outage behavior;
• logging and evidence minimisation;
• threat model and abuse scenarios;
• environment separation;
• recovery and incident response.

High-risk biometric, recovery, financial, health, government, or AI-assisted flows require additional review.

4. Controlled environment access

The partner receives only the access needed for the approved role and environment. Environment separation should prevent test identities, credentials, clients, keys, and data from being reused in production.

Initial access may include:

• partner documentation;
• environment-specific discovery metadata;
• approved client registration process;
• synthetic test identities and credentials;
• schema and policy profiles;
• support and issue-reporting channels;
• conformance and negative-test suites.

5. Profile agreement

The parties pin the exact technical and trust profile:

• protocol and specification versions;
• credential format and schema versions;
• algorithms and key relationships;
• holder-binding and proof requirements;
• status and lifecycle behavior;
• request and response protection;
• error and retry semantics;
• policy and assurance levels;
• metadata refresh and change notification.

No partner should infer support for an optional feature merely because it appears in an external standard.

6. Implementation and test

The partner implements the approved flow using synthetic or approved test data. Testing should cover:

• successful issuance or verification;
• invalid, missing, and excessive data;
• wrong issuer, subject, audience, or transaction;
• expired, suspended, revoked, and superseded credentials;
• unsupported algorithms and versions;
• replay and duplicate submission;
• key rotation and metadata refresh;
• dependency outage and timeout;
• consent cancellation and abandoned flows;
• recovery, rollback, or review where applicable.

7. Assurance and production readiness

Production approval should confirm:

• contractual and role allocation complete;
• security and privacy findings resolved or accepted by an owner;
• conformance profile and test results recorded;
• key and client lifecycle operational;
• monitoring, support, incident, and escalation ready;
• retention and evidence controls implemented;
• capacity and resilience appropriate for the service;
• public claims and user communications accurate;
• rollback, suspension, and credential-lifecycle procedures tested.

8. Go-live and operational governance

After approval, the partner operates within the agreed profile. Material changes require review. Operational governance includes:

• service and verification outcome monitoring;
• metadata, key, certificate, and client rotation;
• credential status and lifecycle management;
• incident coordination;
• periodic access and trust review;
• specification and policy updates;
• deprecation and migration planning;
• evidence retention and audit support.

Onboarding deliverables

A controlled onboarding package may include:

Deliverable	Purpose
Use-case and role statement	Defines participants, authority, purpose, and decision ownership
Data-flow and trust-boundary diagram	Shows where data, keys, policy, and evidence cross responsibilities
Credential profile	Defines semantics, schema, assurance, binding, status, and lifecycle
Integration profile	Pins protocols, versions, security features, and error behavior
Trust policy	Defines accepted issuers, credentials, algorithms, and outcomes
Test plan and evidence	Demonstrates positive, negative, replay, lifecycle, and outage behavior
Operational responsibility matrix	Assigns support, incident, rotation, change, and recovery ownership
Production approval record	Identifies approved scope, environment, version, conditions, and reviewers

Access and least privilege

Partner access should be:

• role-bound;
• environment-bound;
• purpose-bound;
• time-bounded where appropriate;
• separately authenticated for people and workloads;
• reviewed periodically;
• revoked promptly when no longer required;
• observable without exposing secrets in logs.

Discovery access does not imply issuance, signing, verification administration, recovery, or operational authority.

Test data

Testing should default to synthetic data. Real personal data should be used only when necessary, authorized, minimized, and protected under the same or stronger controls expected in production.

Test credentials must be visibly and technically distinct from production credentials and should not be accepted by production verifiers.

Change management

A partner must coordinate changes that affect:

• credential types or schemas;
• algorithms, keys, certificates, or identifiers;
• metadata, clients, or endpoints;
• trust policy and assurance;
• status and lifecycle behavior;
• privacy, retention, or jurisdiction conditions;
• production volume or criticality;
• subcontractors or infrastructure providers.

Unannounced breaking changes create trust debt and can invalidate prior conformance evidence.

Suspension and termination

The onboarding model should define how to:

• suspend a compromised client, key, issuer, or verifier;
• stop new issuance or verification while preserving investigation evidence;
• communicate credential-status implications;
• revoke access and rotate shared material;
• export or delete data according to role and retention obligations;
• support holders and relying parties during transition;
• retire public metadata and redirect dependencies safely.

Public documentation boundary

The public portal describes the onboarding stages and responsibilities. Partner credentials, environment locations, client registrations, exact schemas, test identities, trust lists, service levels, contacts, findings, and production approval records are delivered only through authenticated channels.

Start with Build with UbID, then review the Integration Model, Trust and Policy, and Public Metadata and Discovery.