Federated Identity Architecture of the European eID System

Abstract

Federated identity management is a method that facilitates management of identity processes and policies among the collaborating entities without a centralized control. Nowadays, there are many federated identity solutions, however, most of them covers different aspects of the identification problem, solving in some cases specific problems. Thus, none of these initiatives has consolidated as a unique solution and surely it will remain like that in a near future. To assist users choosing a possible solution, we analyze different federated identify approaches, showing main features, and making a comparative study among them. The former problem is even worst when multiple organizations or countries already have legacy eID systems, as it is the case of Europe. In this paper, we also present the European eID solution, a purely federated identity system that aims to serve almost 500 million people and that could be extended in midterm also to eID companies. The system is now being deployed at the EU level and we present the basic architecture and evaluate its performance and scalability, showing that the solution is feasible from the point of view of performance while keeping security constrains in mind. The results show a good performance of the solution in local, organizational, and remote environments.

Keywords

• User authentication
• single sign-on
• identity federation
• identity and access management (IAM)
• authentication and authorization infrastructure (AAI)
• federated identity architecture (FIA)