On integration of academic attributes in the eIDAS infrastructure to support cross-border services

The EU Regulation 910/2014 on electronic identification and trusted services for electronic transactions in the internal market, known also as eIDAS Regulation, will become effective on 29 September 2018. By that date, each EU Member State is required to recognize the electronic identities of other EU Member States that have notified their electronic identification (eID) schemes. From the technical point of view, intensive efforts are being spent to effectively connect the various national eID schemes in a unified interoperability architecture, the eIDAS infrastructure.This paper describes our proposal to integrate academic attributes into the eIDAS infrastructure, as part of the ''eID for University'' project (in short eID4U). This project aims to support the practical implementation of the eIDAS Regulation in a selected set of academic services at the universities participating in the project. The objective is to enhance the eIDAS infrastructure with support for academic attributes and to design and implement a set of eIDAS-enabled academic e-services, like the Registration in some study programmes (e.g. Erasmus student exchange programme) or the Login facility (with national eIDs) on a foreign university's web portal.