A Proposal for a Unified Identity Card for Use in an Academic Federation Environment

A lot of effort has been made recently to build academic federations. However some issues are still open. The first is off-line authentication. Today's model of federation requires systems to work on-line and synchronously, what limits its use for some applications. Second, the data federated institutions make available is only for computer systems and not for people. This makes it difficult for humans involved to assess such credentials. Finally, the federation has numerous technical and legal issues for the provision of private data such as biometric parameters. Even tough, these would bring a much stronger authentication process. Therefore this research proposes to model an identity card based on ICAO 9303 standard for usage in academic federated environments. This proposal enables off-line authentication, assessment of credentials by human agents and allow the usage of private biometric data in a secure manner.