Secure Indigenous Identity Verification on AWS
Explore how we built Debwewin—a culturally respectful, secure, and scalable identity verification platform for Indigenous communities—leveraging AWS and modern DevOps practices to ensure authenticity, integrity, and digital sovereignty.
Project Synopsis
Debwewin is an Indigenous digital identity verification platform developed by Biskane Inc., designed to serve over 1.8 million Indigenous people in Canada. The platform ensures the verification of Indigenous identities with respect for cultural sovereignty, legal guidelines, and community validation.
To support this mission, we developed a secure, scalable cloud infrastructure using Kubernetes on AWS. The platform incorporates a decentralized trust registry, community data validation, and advanced APIs for external system integration. Our custom OAuth2 integration ensures secure, culturally aligned identity access management.
Key Features
Decentralized Identity Verification
Built on AWS infrastructure, Debwewin allows Indigenous Nations to participate in digital validation using a sovereign trust model.
Cultural & Legal Data Policies
All data handling complies with Indigenous data sovereignty, GDPR, and the Seven Grandfather Teachings.
Project Requirements
The platform needed to meet the unique demands of Indigenous identity validation, combining secure, scalable infrastructure with culturally sensitive verification processes.
Key Challenges
Developing Debwewin involved addressing a range of both technical and cultural challenges to ensure respectful, accurate identity verification.
Balancing cultural respect with secure technology practices
Creating a flexible identity trust registry governed by communities
Implementing a custom OAuth2 integration respecting Indigenous protocols
Maintaining low-latency performance while protecting sensitive data
Ensuring compliance with GDPR and Indigenous data sovereignty simultaneously
Solution Implementation
Our team delivered a highly secure, containerized infrastructure using AWS services and Kubernetes, complemented by advanced identity management and verification APIs.
Our Approach
Deployed Kubernetes clusters via EKS with microservice architecture for modularity
Used EC2 Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing for dynamic scaling
Stored identity documentation securely in Amazon S3 with CloudFront delivery and WAF filtering
Implemented OAuth2 identity flows tailored for Indigenous use cases
Integrated PostgreSQL using Amazon RDS with multi-zone replication and automated backups
Results
Debwewin now empowers Indigenous communities with sovereign control over digital identities. The infrastructure has exceeded uptime, security, and scalability expectations.
Key Results
uptime across AWS regions
compliant with Indigenous and international data policies
with third-party platforms via secure APIs
identity provider supporting over 5,000 users
validation latency via edge delivery