Smart Cross-Border e-Gov Systems: An application to refugee mobility

Smart Cross-Border e-Government Systems for citizens and business have been recently proposed to further improve everyday lives, expand business fron-tiers, and facilitate the movement of citizens by reducing the constraints imposed by existing borders between federal states. Their main advantage is their ability to be used by governmental organizations, citizens, and business, in a cross border envi-ronment, thanks to the availability of recently developed electronic authentication, identification and signature platforms. These latest technological advances may con-tribute to solving the mobility issue of legitimate refugees in various European coun-tries. This problem has at the time of writing evolved into a major crisis due to the mass movement of hundreds of thousands of Syrian and Iraqi refugees across Europe and requires immediate attention. An implementation of Smart Cross-Border e-Government Systems appears to be a very good option in supporting the management of individuals and their movement in order to address this crisis

Providing Login and Wi-Fi Access Services With the eIDAS Network: A Practical Approach

The digital identity (or electronic identity) of a person is about being able to prove upon authentication who one is on the Internet, with a certain level of assurance, such as by means of some attributes obtained from a trustworthy Identity Provider. In Europe, the eIDAS Network allows the citizens to authenticate securely with their national credentials and to provide such personal attributes when getting access to Service Providers in a different European country. Although the eIDAS Network is more and more known, its integration with real operational services is still at an initial phase. This paper presents two eIDAS-enabled services, Login with eIDAS and Wi-Fi access with eIDAS , that we have designed, implemented, deployed, and validated at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy. The validation study involved several undergraduate students, who have run the above services with their authentication credentials and platforms and with minimal indications on their usage. The results indicate that the services were beneficial. Several advantages exist both for the users and for the Service Providers, such as resistance to some security attacks and the possibility to adopt the service without prior user registration ( e.g. for short meetings, or in public places). However, some students expressed doubts about exploiting their national eID for Wi-Fi access, mainly in connection with usability and privacy issues. We discuss also these concerns, along with advantages and disadvantages of the proposed services

Current Trends in Pan-European Identity Management Systems

The demand for electronic identity has grown as a result of governments? promotion of e-Government, in which the citizen-public administration relationship often has a strictly personal nature and requires digital identification systems that are univocal, secure, and global. The management of this identity by public administrations is an important challenge, accentuated when interoperability among public administrations of different countries become necessary. In this paper current trends in pan-euroean identity management systems are analysized and a outlook of the future European scenary is shown

Advanced eGovernment Information Service Bus (eGov-Bus)

The eGov-Bus project provides citizens and businesses with improved access to virtual public services, which are based on existing national eGovernment Web services and which support cross-border life events. Requirements and specific rules of these life events are considered, and personalization of user preferences is supported. eGov-Bus is based on adaptable process management technologies, allowing for virtual services which are dynamically combined from existing national eGovernment services. In this way, a comprehensive workflow process is set up, allowing for service-level agreements, an audit trail and explanation of the process to the end user. The eGov-Bus process engine operates on top of a virtual repository, providing a high-level semantic view of information retrieved from heterogeneous information sources, such as eGovernment Web services. Further, eGov-Bus relies on a security framework to ensure all high-level security requirements are met. The eGov-Bus architecture is business oriented, it focuses on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) concepts, asynchronously combining Web services and providing a Service Bus.Frameworks and Guidelines, eGovernment Ontologies, Admininistrative Process Design, Life Events, Web Services, Service Bus Integration

An identity framework for providing access to FIWARE OAuth 2.0-based services according to the eIDAS European Regulation

Secure electronic identification (eID) is one of the key enablers of data protection, privacy, and the prevention of online fraud. However, until now, the lack of common legal basis prevented European Member States from recognizing and accepting eIDs issued in the other Member States. The electronic identification and trust services (eIDAS) regulation provides a solution to these issues by ensuring the cross-border mutual recognition of eIDs. FIWARE is a European initiative that provides a rather simple yet powerful set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that ease the development of smart applications in multiple vertical sectors and oriented to the future internet. In this paper, we propose a model that enables the connection of FIWARE OAuth 2.0-based services with the eID authentication provided by eIDAS reference. Thanks to this model, services already connected with an OAuth 2.0 identity provider can be automatically connected with eIDAS nodes for providing eID authentication to European citizens. For validating the proposed model, we have deployed an instance of the FIWARE identity manager connected to the Spanish eIDAS node. Then, we have registered two services, a private videoconferencing system, and a public smart city deployment, and extended their functionalities for enriching the user experience leveraging the eID authentication. We have evaluated the integration of both services in the eIDAS network with real users from seven different countries. We conclude that the proposed model facilitates the integration of generic and FIWARE-based OAuth 2.0 services to the eIDAS infrastructure, making the connection transparent for developers

Electronic identification for universities: Building cross-border services based on the eIDAS infrastructure

The European Union (EU) Regulation 910/2014 on electronic IDentification, Authentication, and trust Services (eIDAS) for electronic transactions in the internal market went into effect on 29 September 2018, meaning that EU Member States are required to recognize the electronic identities issued in the countries that have notified their eID schemes. Technically speaking, a unified interoperability platform—named eIDAS infrastructure—has been set up to connect the EU countries’ national eID schemes to allow a person to authenticate in their home EU country when getting access to services provided by an eIDAS-enabled Service Provider (SP) in another EU country. The eIDAS infrastructure allows the transfer of authentication requests and responses back and forth between its nodes, transporting basic attributes about a person, e.g., name, surname, date of birth, and a so-called eIDAS identifier. However, to build new eIDAS-enabled services in specific domains, additional attributes are needed. We describe our approach to retrieve and transport new attributes through the eIDAS infrastructure, and we detail their exploitation in a selected set of academic services. First, we describe the definition and the support for the additional attributes in the eIDAS nodes. We then present a solution for their retrieval from our university. Finally, we detail the design, implementation, and installation of two eIDAS-enabled academic services at our university: the eRegistration in the Erasmus student exchange program and the Login facility with national eIDs on the university portal