Towards Interoperability: An Architecture for Pan-European elD-Based Authentication Services

摘要

In the last years several EU Member States have rolled out smart-card based electronic ID (eID) solutions to their citizens. Not all of these solutions are directly compatible to each other. However, with respect to the i2010 e-Government initiative and the upcoming EU Services Directive, cross-border identification and authentication is now on the agenda of all EU Member States. In this paper we present a smart-card based eID identification and authentication solution, which supports smart-cards from different Member States. The proposed solution can be easily integrated into existing authentication and identity management solutions and does not necessarily require any additional client software to be installed by citizens.