THE PREVALENCE OF SAML WITHIN THE EUROPEAN UNION: An Empirical Study

摘要

Various European countries have set up national eID infrastructures that allow citizens to securely authenticate at e-Government or e-Banking services. In a converging European society, interoperability between national eID solutions becomes an important issue. The EU large scale pilot STORK tackles this issue and implements an interoperability layer that connects national infrastructures. The secure, reliable, and efficient exchange of identity information is thus a key feature of the STORK interoperability layer. Several protocols exist that are basically able to implement this feature. In private sector applications, SAML is frequently used for the exchange of identity and authentication data. To verify whether this protocol has also proven itself in the public e-Government domain, a survey on existing national eID solutions based on SAML has been carried out. The survey was based on a comprehensive questionnaire that was sent out to 14 Member States of the European Union. The collected results revealed that SAML is prevalently used in most national eID solutions and hence perfectly suitable to build the basis of the STORK interoperability layer.