GlobaliD: Federated identity provider associated with national citizen's card

Digital Identity is the representation of the overall known information about a user across online applications. Digital identity management is the collection of processes, policies and technologies to manage the complete life cycle of users' identities, such as creation, management, and destruction. Most web applications request users to have a registered digital identity in their system to allow access to their services. Having a myriad of digital identities to manage, users tend to take less protective measures regarding their identities and become reluctant at the moment of adopting (other) applications. Furthermore, having the personal information scattered across many systems, concerns users about its whereabouts and many times leads them to provide false information. The Federation identity concept was introduced to address user digital identity management overload by creating a framework for systems interoperability. It establishes a set of rules and standards in order to create a reliable and secure namespace for the exchanging of identity information between source (usually users via their identity provider) and target (usually web applications), allowing users to access several web applications seamlessly by using only one digital identity. This paper reflects on an approach to the federated identity management, by using a collection of federation standards for the developing of a federated identity provider to enable users to access the web applications seamlessly using a publicly available strong identification mechanism: the National Electronic Citizen Identity Card. Our aim with the development of the GlobaliD identity provider is to take a step further in the digital identity management, making it more versatile, responsible, anonymity and privacy-safe, trustworthy and thus secure.