FutureID – Shaping the Future of Electronic Identity

Abstract. The FutureID project builds a comprehensive, flexible, privacy-aware and ubiquitously
usable identity management infrastructure for Europe, which integrates existing eID
technology and trust infrastructures, emerging federated identity management services and
modern credential technologies to provide a user-centric system for the trustworthy and accountable
management of identity claims. The FutureID infrastructure will provide great benefits
to all stakeholders involved in the eID value chain. Users will benefit from the availability
of a ubiquitously usable open source eID client that is capable of running on arbitrary desktop
PCs, tablets and modern smart phones. FutureID will allow application and service providers to
easily integrate their existing services with the FutureID infrastructure, providing them with the
benefits from the strong security offered by eIDs without requiring them to make substantial
investments. This will enable service providers to offer this technology to users as an alternative
to username/password based systems, providing them with a choice for a more trustworthy,
usable and innovative technology. For existing and emerging trust service providers and card
issuers FutureID will provide an integrative framework, which eases using their authentication
and signature related products across Europe and beyond. To demonstrate the applicability of
the developed technologies and the feasibility of the overall approach FutureID will develop
two pilot applications and is open for additional application services who want to use the innovative
FutureID technology. This paper provides a short overview of the FutureID project.
Keywords. Identity Management, eID, Identity Broker, Open Source Client