Category: Digital Sovereignty

eIDAS-Signer launched

Digital Sovereignty, eID, eIDAS, eSeal, eSignature, go.eIDAS, mGov4EU

The EU-funded mGov4EU project follows a citizen-centric approach to enable secure and privacy-friendly mobile government services across Europe. Among the project results is the novel eIDAS-Signer service (https://Signer.eID.AS), which allows to use electronic identification (eID) means, such as the German eID or ID Austria, for the creation of advanced or qualified electronic signatures in a mobile environment.

There are currently 32 (pre-) notified eID-Schemes in Europe. Furthermore there are currently 260 Qualified Trust Service Providers (QTSPs), among which 189 issue qualified certificates for electronic signature purposes. Against this background the mGov4EU project has assembled leading European experts from government, business and science located in Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Germany, and Spain in order to design the next generation service infrastructure for Europe and develop innovative services on this basis.

This especially bridges the gap between the “eID” part and the “AS” (trust services) part of the eIDAS regulation in order to enable trustworthy, mobile and citizen-centric electronic business and cross-border government processes all over Europe.

mGov4EU bridges the gap between eID and AS for mobile citizen

An important result of the mGov4EU project is the novel and community-driven eIDAS-Signer service, which is available at https://Signer.eID.AS and allows to create advanced or qualified electronic signatures after suitable electronic identification processes in a mobile environment.

Welcome to the eIDAS-Signer

The eIDAS-Signer service has been co-designed with a variety of experts within the open eIDAS community, assembled around the non-profit go.eIDAS e.V., and has been developed and is operated by ecsec GmbH in a certified environment to provide an easy to use and SME-suitable alternative to already existing, but purely commercially oriented offerings, which are typically provided by multi-national enterprises.

While the eIDAS-Signer service currently only supports ID Austria and the German eID, it is an obvious goal to support the other notified eID-Schemes and more QTSPs as depicted below.

Please feel free to reach out to the open eIDAS community to get support, suggest improvements or new features as well as priorities for further development.

We gratefully acknowledge that the eIDAS-Signer builds upon components and services, which have been developed within research projects supported by the European Commission (FutureTrust and mGov4EU) and the German Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action (SkIDentity and TEAM-X).

Deploy with GAIA-X – Towards Digital Sovereignty at a push of a button

Cloud, Digital Sovereignty, GAIA-X, SkIDentity

Digital sovereignty describes the ability to shape the digital transformation in a self-determined manner with regard to hardware, software, services, and skills. Common standards, modular architectures and the use of Open Source in the public sector are considered to be central pillars for digital sovereignty and interoperability and GAIA-X is expected to provide a major contribution for the practical implementation of digital sovereignty in Europe.

Against this background leading European cloud experts from Cloud & Heat, Charité / deNBI, D3TN, ecsec, IONOS, publicplan, Red Hat / IBM, Scheer and Trusted Cloud have joined forces to demonstrate the feasibility of deploying composite Open Source applications, such as Nextcloud with the recently presented eID-Login App, via the orchestrator engine Krake to suitable cloud environments as determined by matching user requirements with provider Self-Description files. The application of eIDAS-compliant identity management services provided by SkIDentity ensure the required high level of trust, legal compliance and easy application across Europe.

The presented “Deploy with GAIA-X” prototype will be the starting point for the implementation of the German public code repository “Ort für öffentlichen Code”, which is envisioned to foster digital sovereignty in all levels of the German public sector – from the local government level via the federal states to the federal level.