Achieving the eIDAS Vision Through the Mobile, Social and Cloud Triad

Abstract

The new EU regulation on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in internal market aims to overcome cross-border barriers regarding identity and signature services. According to the Head of the European Commission DG CONNECT Task Force “Legislation Team”, the eIDAS regulation sets out to “strengthen EU single market by boosting TRUST and CONVENIENCE in secure and seamless cross-border electronic transactions”.

Although the proposed regulation is technology-neutral, we believe that the technology used by the Mobile, Social and Cloud triad can greatly boost the deployment of applications and, therefore, may accelerate the achievement of the eIDAS vision. Mobile devices have become the something-you-have authentication factor that has been generally delegated to hardware tokens. Smartphones allow deploying highly-secure yet user-friendly mechanisms that can complement existing national eIDs and overcome user-experience drawbacks. Furthermore, identity services are not solely useful for backing up identities provisioned and managed by Member States but can also enhance services by federating and elevating trust on social and other consumer identities. Finally, light Web formats and modern user-centric and privacy-aware standards like OAuth and OpenID Connect make it easy for developers to combine identities and functionality and may revolutionize the quantity and quality of applications, owing both to the plethora of access devices and the advantages of Cloud computing delivery.