Single sign-on to the web with an EMV card

Single sign-on has been on the wish-list of many information systems professionals since the early days of networked computers. Initially the challenge was to bridge a diverse range of proprietary systems but more recently the challenge has been to specify a system, particularly for the World Wide Web, that is: portable, suitable for universal deployment and sufficiently trustworthy for the participating entities. Some solutions have been developed but in general they rely on one party authenticating a user through a user id and password and the other participant organizations trusting that authentication. This paper proposes a framework for single sign-on that meets the mentioned criteria by using an EMV card for two-factor authentication, without the card making physical contact with the network connected device, and without exposing the keys and PIN that are used to protect financial transactions. The proposed framework also offers a basic form of single point of user registration that helps protect the cardholder's privacy from the service provider(s) and the framework could offer some non-repudiation properties for the authentication.