Security and privacy improvements for the Belgian eID technology

Abstract

The Belgian Electronic Identity Card enables Belgian citizens to prove their identity digitally and to sign electronic documents. At the end of 2009, every Belgian citizen older than 12 years will have such an eID card. In the future, usage of the eID card may be mandatory. However, irresponsible use of the card may cause harm to individuals. Currently, there exist some privacy and security problems related to the use of the eID card. This paper focuses on solutions to tackle these problems. A new authentication protocol is introduced to substantially reduce the risk of abusing the single sign-on authentication and privacy friendly identity files are proposed to improve the citizen's privacy. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009.