Bring your own identity - Case study from the Swiss government

Abstract

Imagine that you are a citizen or a company and you are able to file your tax declaration or exchange governmental information by using your favourite existing electronic identity (eID), such as your bank or consumer account. At present, citizens and companies quite often have to create an individual account for almost every government application to share or exchange information. Enabling “bring your own identity” (ByoID) for eGovernment means that access management (AM) will gradually converge to create a single, user-friendly approach in the future. From a technical point of view, many of the necessary features and protocols already exist but have not yet been widely implemented in eGovernment environments. This poses a very complex challenge, both from an operational point of view and from an IT governance and compliance perspective. The only way to solve this is close collaboration among citizens, the private sector and the government. The basis will be an identity and access management (IAM) system that can be adapted to the comprehensive requirements resulting from the aforementioned collaboration. In this article, we describe the path the Swiss government has taken for establishing such a flexible IAM system from the IT providers’ perspective while respecting security and privacy requirements.