Oslo, Norway, November 14-16, 2012: The EC-funded three-year project, FutureID, commenced work with a kick-off meeting hosted by its coordinator, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. It addresses, with support from the Norwegian Computing Center (Norsk Regnesentral),  the challenges of bringing secure identities to the Internet. 

Electronic Identities (eIDs) are now issued by many European countries and promise a drastic increase in the security and trust of identities on the Internet.  Yet, everyday use of eIDs remains low and lags behind original expectations. 

The FutureID project attempts to change this by addressing some of the major remaining challenges:

• Open Source eID Client: develops an innovative, ubiquitously usable, standards-compliant open source eID client that makes eIDs accessible from all major platforms, including mobile devices, across various protocols and formats.  Each installation can support all major eIDs. 
   
• Support of Service Providers: In support of Service Providers, FutureID develops new server components that will drastically reduce the cost of supporting multiple eIDs and protocols.
   
• Coherent Trust Infrastructure for Europe: Addressing an urgent need, FutureID will further conceive and develop a comprehensive and coherent trust infrastructure for Europe.It integrates existing trust services and addresses issues, such as, liability.This allows relying parties to evaluate the levels of trust in presented eIDs.
   
• Privacy Enhancement: To overcome privacy concerns, FutureID will conduct specific research on state-of-the-art privacy-enhancement technologies for the eID infrastructure.
   
• Non-Technical Issues: will thoroughly study legal, socio-economical, and other non-technical issues including the ease of use of the software. 
   
• Demonstrations: FutureID will demonstrate and evaluate the results in two settings:  a health care citizen service, which allows European citizens to identify themselves to healthcare institutions in other European countries and an enterprise use case which addresses the integration of eID services into the corporate value chain. 

“FutureID will consider the interests of all the stakeholders involved in the eID ecosystem in order to create economically viable solutions” says Dr. Heiko Roßnagel, the project coordinator. 

FutureID is partially funded under the EC’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) as a large scale integrating project.  The consortium is composed of 19 partners from 11 European countries, and combines the multi-disciplinary and complementary competence of large industry, small and medium enterprises, top research organizations and universities, a data protection agency, and a non-profit association.  Further information is available at https://www.nr.no/en/projects/futureid-shaping-future-electronic-identity and http://FutureID.eu/.

Contact:

Dr. Lothar Fritsch

Lothar.Fritsch @ NR.no