Providing digital identity and academic attributes through European eID infrastructures: Results achieved, limitations, and future steps

Abstract

Electronic identity is getting an increased importance nowadays since relentless digitalization and 24/7 connectivity continue to transform everyday life. To support the recognition of electronic identification cross-border within the European Union, the European Commission (EC) released the eIDAS Regulation, which became effective on September 2018. To put eIDAS in practice, the EC has supported the definition of the technical specification; it provides a sample implementation; and it coordinates the eIDAS Network composed of eIDAS nodes of various countries. Each eIDAS node has a generic part required for the communication with the other nodes, and a specific part that each country has to modify independently according to its legal, operational, and technical requirements. Although this specific part is very important because it affects the node flexibility and the interaction with the other actors at the national level, it is less known in practice. We describe the adaptation of this specific part in Italy to perform authentication and provision of attributes through the STORK and STORK 2.0 infrastructures (the predecessors of eIDAS), based on our experience in the homonym projects. Significant effort is spent currently to build real services exploiting the eIDAS infrastructure, eg, the eID4U project proposes eIDAS node extension with new attributes required by some common academic services, such as student registration at a foreign university. We describe the support for these new attributes in the eIDAS nodes and the modification of the specific part of the Italian eIDAS node to allow attributes retrieval from different authorities.

ELMO2EDS: Transforming Educational Credentials into Self-Sovereign Identity Paradigm

“…The connection enables students to log in using their access data from the requested HEI and transfer data. The requested data is retrieved via the EMP using the EMREX protocol [21].…”

Digital Human Assets and Psycho-digital Risks. Concept and recommendations

“…It should be noted that the beginnings of the digital society have occurred through the convenient creation of user profiles in virtual accounts without the necessary correspondence, with physical identity. To give an example, the European Union is working to shape a certificate or digital document that unifies documents such as passport, driver's license, medical and banking data, to name a few (Berbecaru, 2019).…”

Enhancing University Services by Extending the eIDAS European Specification with Academic Attributes

“…Section 4 explains the details of this proposal. On the other hand, Lioy et al [34][35][36] proposed the application of this extension to specific services provided by Politecnico di Torino as well as an architecture to obtain the new attributes from Italian certified sources. In the same line, Klobučar [37,38] showed the integration of the Slovenian higher education system with the extended eIDAS infrastructure.…”