Advances in Electronic Identity Models and Their Applications

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Computer Science & Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2022) | Viewed by 15149

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Politecnico di Torino, Department of Control and Computer Engineering, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24, 10129 Torino, Italy
Interests: computer security; network security; electronic identity; public key infrastructures and applications; transport layer security (TLS) protocol robustness; authentication and authorization

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Guest Editor
go.eIDAS e.V. / ecsec GmbH
Interests: electronic identity; electronic signatures; public key infrastructures; verifiable credentials; applied cryptography for useful applications

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Guest Editor
Computer and Information Technology Department, Faculty of Automatics, Computers and Electronics, University of Craiova, Bvd.Decebal, Nr.107, Craiova, RO-200440, Romania
Interests: artificial intelligence; multi-agent systems; software engineering; distributed systems; formal methods
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In the last decade, various identity management systems (IDMs) have attracted attention because they allow entities providing services to delegate user authentication to other dedicated, trusted parties. Thus, IDMs have been increasingly used, not only between different organizations and control domains, but also to ease citizen’s access to services at a national level or in cross-country scenarios. In this context, the electronic identities (eIDs) of the persons or companies, their identifiers, the infrastructures handling such information, and the legal and privacy issues concerning eIDs exploitation have been subject to intensive research.

An electronic identity (sometimes called also digital identity) is a means for people or organizations to prove they are who they say they are, with a certain level of assurance. While the concept is quite widely recognized, the exploitation of eIDs in real services and different types of digital service infrastructures is still in its infancy. For example, the European Union (EU) Regulation 910/2014 on electronic IDentification, Authentication, and trust Services (eIDAS) lays the grounds for the legal recognition of eIDs between the European Member States. The eIDAS network implementing such regulations is nowadays operational in many EU countries, allowing for the authentication of citizens in their countries and for the transfer of basic data about them to services abroad. Nevertheless, several works and research projects are currently addressing the integration of eIDs valid under eIDAS, with other additional attributes about persons (or organizations) in academic, health, or smart city scenarios, and with other digital service infrastructures.

On the other hand, new identity models such, as self-sovereign identity or decentralized identity leveraging blockchain and distributed ledger technology, are getting increased attention. Such identity models allow identity holders to create and control their verifiable credentials without an intermediate or centralized administrative authority intervening. Although the model is becoming more and more known, significant work still needs to be done in the future in order to make decentralized identity a reality.

This Special Issue encourages authors to submit original research articles, reviews, theoretical and critical perspectives, and viewpoint articles, on (but not limited to) the following topics:

  • Electronic identities, identifiers, and identity models
  • Trust models in digital service infrastructures
  • Attribute linking, attribute aggregation, attribute retrieval, and identity matching
  • Exploitation of electronic identities in cross-sectorial and cross-border services
  • Decentralized identity
  • Privacy issues in electronic identity management infrastructures

Dr. Diana Berbecaru
Dr. Detlef Hühnlein
Prof. Costin Badica
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • eIDAS
  • Digital service infrastructures
  • Attribute management in electronic identity infrastructures
  • Verifiable credentials
  • Trust, compliance, and digital sovereignty
  • Self-sovereign identity
  • Privacy issues in electronic identity infrastructures

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

18 pages, 1359 KiB  
Article
User-Centric Privacy for Identity Federations Based on a Recommendation System
by Carlos Villarán and Marta Beltrán
Electronics 2022, 11(8), 1238; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11081238 - 14 Apr 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2503
Abstract
Specifications such as SAML, OAuth, OpenID Connect and Mobile Connect are essential for solving identification, authentication and authorisation in contexts such as mobile apps, social networks, e-commerce, cloud computing or the Internet of Things. However, end-users relying on identity providers to access resources, [...] Read more.
Specifications such as SAML, OAuth, OpenID Connect and Mobile Connect are essential for solving identification, authentication and authorisation in contexts such as mobile apps, social networks, e-commerce, cloud computing or the Internet of Things. However, end-users relying on identity providers to access resources, applications or services lose control over the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) they share with the different providers composing identity federations. This work proposes a user-centric approach based on a recommendation system to support users in making privacy decisions such as selecting service providers or choosing their privacy settings. The proposed Privacy Advisor gives end-users privacy protection by providing personalised recommendations without compromising the identity federations’ functionalities or requiring any changes in their underlying specifications. A proof of concept of the proposed recommendation system is presented to validate and evaluate its utility and feasibility. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Electronic Identity Models and Their Applications)
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36 pages, 697 KiB  
Article
eID and Self-Sovereign Identity Usage: An Overview
by Daniela Pöhn, Michael Grabatin and Wolfgang Hommel
Electronics 2021, 10(22), 2811; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10222811 - 16 Nov 2021
Cited by 20 | Viewed by 8844
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic helped countries to increase the use of their mobile eID solutions. These are based on traditional identity management systems, which suffer from weaknesses, such as the reliance on a central entity to provide the identity data and the lack of [...] Read more.
The COVID-19 pandemic helped countries to increase the use of their mobile eID solutions. These are based on traditional identity management systems, which suffer from weaknesses, such as the reliance on a central entity to provide the identity data and the lack of control of the user over her or his data. The introduction of self-sovereign identity (SSI) for e-government systems can strengthen the privacy of the citizens while enabling identification also for the weakest. To successfully initiate SSI, different factors have to be taken into account. In order to have a clear understanding of the challenges, but also lessons learned, we provide an overview of existing solutions and projects and conducted an analysis of their experiences. Based on a taxonomy, we identified strong points, as well as encountered challenges. The contribution of this paper is threefold: First, we enhanced existing taxonomies based on the literature for further evaluations. Second, we analyzed eID solutions for lessons learned. Third, we evaluated more recently started SSI projects in different states of their lifecycle. This led to a comprehensive discussion of the lessons learned and challenges to address, as well as further findings. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Electronic Identity Models and Their Applications)
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24 pages, 1793 KiB  
Article
Blockchain-Based Employment Contract System Architecture Allowing Encrypted Keyword Searches
by Sanghui Yeom, Seungyeon Choi, Jeonghee Chi and Soyoung Park
Electronics 2021, 10(9), 1086; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10091086 - 4 May 2021
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2726
Abstract
We introduce a blockchain-based online employment contract system to protect the rights and interests of both employees and employers. In the proposed model, an employer and a worker can interactively create a new electronic online contract, and the mutually signed contract is saved [...] Read more.
We introduce a blockchain-based online employment contract system to protect the rights and interests of both employees and employers. In the proposed model, an employer and a worker can interactively create a new electronic online contract, and the mutually signed contract is saved on a contract blockchain so that the contract becomes certifiable but cannot be forged by the contract signers. In particular, the blockchain in our system provides transactional privacy to protect sensitive personal information such as social identifier, contact information, income, and so forth, contained in the contract. Since a remote cloud server must provide not only secure storage, accessibility, and availability of all signed contracts, but also increased security in the server, we propose a new encrypted keyword search mechanism with enhanced search accuracy. Each contract is associated with encrypted keywords generated from the names of contractual parties and must remain confidential and anonymous even to the server. Although, the contracts must always be accessible by the contract signers, only the cloud server should be able to retrieve each user’s contract without decrypting the contract or identifying the contract signer. To meet these requirements, we propose a new encrypted keyword search mechanism based on Gentry’s homomorphic encryption technology; the server can find each user’s contract when two encrypted arbitrary keywords are homomorphic to each other. Since the keywords in the proposed system are based on person names or business names, they are easily predictable, and, thereby, many synonyms for a keyword can exist. Therefore, the proposed encrypted keyword search takes into account not only the keywords but also the ownership of each contract; in this way, the proposed search scheme is secure against a keyword guessing attack and provides strong search accuracy against the keyword synonyms. As a result, users can only access their own contracts, and the cloud server can exactly retrieve the requester’s contracts. Implementations for the proposed system and corresponding analysis on its security and simulated performance are provided. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Electronic Identity Models and Their Applications)
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