A landmark meeting of the groups involved in more than 10 major eID initiatives in Europe and the US has taken place in Paris, France, to drive collaboration on global federated identity management. The SSEDIC (Scoping the Single European Digital Identity Community) International Identity Initiatives Conference (SIIIC) took place in the city before the EEMA European e-Identity Management Conference.

According to the event organisers, the ultimate goal of federated identity is to enable users of one domain to securely access data or systems of another domain seamlessly and without the need for user administration. As European-funded eID projects progress toward their specific objectives, SSEDIC is aiding collaboration on a common set of identity policies, practices and protocols, which will manage the identity and security of users and devices across organisations and borders.

It was agreed that Europe should start turning pilots in to real applications that meet users’ needs and ensure it keeps pace with the rest of the world. “It is important that we work towards achieving a single European digital community, but we must acknowledge that eID is a worldwide challenge and it therefore needs to be addressed at this level, with the EC taking the lead to ensure that Europe adopts standards that will survive globally,” says Roger Dean, executive director for the European association for eID and security, EEMA. “For federated identity to succeed long term there needs to be more engagement with the US, Russia and Asia.” 

These discussions progressed at the SIIIC with a presentation by William C Barker, associate director and Chief Cybersecurity advisor at NIST, who discussed the US National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace project.

SSEDIC coordinator, Maurizio Talamo, comments: “In the future we might see very different eID schemes in use around the world, from large-scale smart card programmes rolled out in Asia and Europe, to the potential deployment of sophisticated knowledge-based rather than token-based eID schemes in the US. All these approaches will face a global, web-based market and a global social community which interacts and cooperates across borders. Global standards and rules will need to be developed to support this evolution.”

The conference was attended by senior representatives and project managers from:

·         SSEDIC – Scoping the Single European Digital Identity Community

·         PEPPOL – Pan European Public Procurement OnLine

·         epSOS – European Patients’ Smart Open Services

·         STORK 2.0 – Secure identity across borders linked

·         eCODEX– eJustice Communication Via Online Data Exchange

·         SPOCS – Simple Procedures Online for Cross-border Services

·         SMIRAMIS – Secure Management of Information across multiple Stakeholders

·         GINI – Global Identity Networking of Individuals 

·         TDL – Trust in Digital Life

·         Forum Atena Association – Atelier Identité Numérique Forum (France)

·         National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace.