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Beyond Passwords: Mapping the Global Digital Identity Landscape with RuleWatcher
- Publishing Team
- May 21
- 4 min read
Author
Khin Win Myat Mon
M.Eng(Master of Information Science and Engineering)
Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering Ritsumeikan University
Key Findings
Passwords are implicated in over 80% of hacking-related breaches globally, yet most organisations lack a policy-level plan to replace them (Verizon, 2023).
RuleWatcher's TreeMap revealed India as the dominant actor in digital identity policy, unexpected for a researcher focused on Western frameworks such as Fast IDentity Online 2 (FIDO2) and Electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services (eIDAS).
A second RuleWatcher search showed AI and Banks as the top clusters for digital identity, confirming it is a cross-sector infrastructure challenge.
Biometrics companies, including 1Kosmos, Aware, and BIO-key, are receiving institutional awards for passwordless solutions, signalling real-world commercial momentum.
Overview
Digital identity security has become a structural global risk. According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (2023), over 80% of hacking-related breaches involve stolen or weak credentials.
This sits at the heart of my academic research on Passwordless authentication, exploring how biometrics, cryptographic tokens, and hardware security keys can replace passwords entirely.
This article explores how RuleWatcher, a policy intelligence platform by OSINTech, was used to map the global institutional response to this challenge. RuleWatcher aggregates publications from governments, international organizations, and NGOs worldwide, offering Search, TreeMap, and Transition views to move from broad discovery to focused source analysis, providing signals that academic databases cannot offer.
Description of the Research
The purpose was to map how global policy was responding to digital identity threats and whether Passwordless authentication was gaining traction beyond technical circles.
Confirmed data breaches reached 10,626 in 2023 double the 2022 figure, with identity systems targeted in over 90% of cyber incidents (Boyce, 2025, accessed via RuleWatcher).
How RuleWatcher Was Used
The first search used the keyword 'cyber security' with the ELSI in Space Tech theme filter, cybersecurity and best practice tags applied. The TreeMap returned the World Economic Forum (WEF) article “Cybercrime is increasingly complex. Here's how data awareness can help” (Boyce, 2025) in the Digital Services block (Figure 1), which was tagged with best practice, cybersecurity, and investment. This article became the primary conceptual reference source for the research.
A second search on 'digital identity security' with the cybersecurity tag revealed India as the largest block in the TreeMap (Figure 2), far exceeding Europe or the US, suggesting
that India's Aadhaar national biometric identification system is a major policy driver.
Separately, a purple biometrics cluster in the upper right of Figure 2 identified an article covering 1Kosmos, Aware, and BIO-key as companies receiving industry awards for Passwordless solutions.
A third search on 'digital identity predictions' revealed AI and Factories as the largest clusters (Figure 3), indicating that digital identity is recognised by policymakers and industry actors as a cross-industry issue spanning sectors such banking, manufacturing, and smart cities.
Clicking the highlighted article opened the detail view (Figure 4), showing tags spanning biometrics, blockchain, data breaches, cybersecurity, and digital ID, suggesting that the policy community treats identity security as a multi-technology problem, not a single-solution one.
What Worked Well in Combination with External Tools
Three tools served distinct roles. RuleWatcher provided real-time policy signals from government, organization, and NGO websites; content unavailable in academic databases. Google Scholar supplied peer-reviewed academic papers on passwordless authentication standards for technical depth. Claude AI supported data analysis and brainstorming, connecting RuleWatcher findings to technical frameworks like FIDO2 and WebAuthn. This three-tool workflow is replicable for any researcher working at the intersection of technology, policy, and security.
Findings and Usefulness
The most significant finding was the geographic breadth of digital identity policy activity India, Chile, Vietnam, and multinational bodies featured prominently, none of which appear consistently in academic research on cybersecurity. Compared to Scopus or Google Scholar, RuleWatcher operates on a different timescale: academic databases capture what was studied; RuleWatcher captures what is currently being acted upon. The TreeMap's visual clustering revealed patterns in minutes that would have taken hours to infer from a list of results.
Can Other Services Have the Same Function?
Google Alerts tracks keywords but delivers individual articles without clustering. Feedly requires manual setup and offers no pattern analysis. RuleWatcher's unique value is surfacing what the researcher did not know to look for. Chile and Vietnam's digital identity policy activity appeared without any prior assumption, something no comparable tool currently replicates.
Conclusion and Future Perspectives
RuleWatcher gave sparks that were not anticipated. Starting with a focus on Western passwordless frameworks, the TreeMap revealed that India dominates digital identity policy globally, and that biometrics companies are already institutionally recognised for practical solutions. These connections between the research problem and areas beyond the original domain would not have emerged from a conventional literature search. For any researcher whose work touches regulation or institutional behaviour, RuleWatcher offers a valuable and complementary research perspective.
Future research could use RuleWatcher's Transition view to track how digital identity policy has shifted over time and apply regional filters in depth. For other researchers, RuleWatcher has clear applications in threat intelligence monitoring, compliance landscape mapping, and cross-jurisdictional policy comparison.
References
Biometric Update. (2019, December 23). Digital identity predictions for 2020: biometrics, deepfakes, cybersecurity and decentralized ID. Biometric Update. Source discovered via RuleWatcher.
Biometric Update. (2022, February 11). Kaizen Secure Voiz, 1Kosmos, Aware, BIO-key rewarded for biometrics strides. Biometric Update. Source discovered via RuleWatcher.
Boyce, R. (2025, January 29). Cybercrime is increasingly complex. Here's how data awareness can help. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/cybercrime-data-cybersecurity/ Source discovered via RuleWatcher.
FIDO Alliance. (2024). FIDO Alliance annual report: Passkey adoption and the road to a passwordless future. FIDO Alliance. https://fidoalliance.org/
Verizon. (2023). 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report. Verizon Business. https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/
World Economic Forum. (2025). Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-cybersecurity-outlook-2025/
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