Personal identification in the web using electronic identity cards and a personal identity provider

Abstract

This paper presents a new paradigm for implementing the authentication of individuals within Web sessions. Nowadays many countries have deployed electronic identity cards (eID tokens) for their citizens' personal identification, but these are not yet well integrated with the authentication of people in Web sessions. We used the concept of Personal Identity Provider (PIdP) to replace (or complement) the role ordinarily given to institutional Identity Providers (IdPs), which are trusted third parties to which service providers delegate the identification and the authentication of their clients. By running locally on a citizen's computer, the PIdP paradigm is well suited to assist his/her eID-based authentication. In this paper we describe an eID-based authentication protocol handled by a PIdP, its implementation and its integration in a production scenario (a campus-wide, Shibboleth IdP-based authentication infrastructure used in University of Aveiro). © 2014 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.