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Summary: Electronic identity is getting an increased importance nowadays since relentless digitalization and 24/7 connectivity continue to transform everyday life. To support the recognition of electronic identification cross‐border within the European Union, the European Commission (EC) released the eIDAS Regulation, which became effective on September 2018. To put eIDAS in practice, the EC has supported the definition of the technical specification; it provides a sample implementation; and it coordinates the eIDAS Network composed of eIDAS nodes of various countries. Each eIDAS node has a generic part required for the communication with the other nodes, and a specific part that each country has to modify independently according to its legal, operational, and technical requirements. Although this specific part is very important because it affects the node flexibility and the interaction with the other actors at the national level, it is less known in practice. We describe the adaptation of this specific part in Italy to perform authentication and provision of attributes through the STORK and STORK 2.0 infrastructures (the predecessors of eIDAS), based on our experience in the homonym projects. Significant effort is spent currently to build real services exploiting the eIDAS infrastructure, eg, the eID4U project proposes eIDAS node extension with new attributes required by some common academic services, such as student registration at a foreign university. We describe the support for these new attributes in the eIDAS nodes and the modification of the specific part of the Italian eIDAS node to allow attributes retrieval from different authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) Regulation 910/2014 on electronic IDentification, Authentication, and trust Services (eIDAS) for electronic transactions in the internal market went into effect on 29 September 2018, meaning that EU Member States are required to recognize the electronic identities issued in the countries that have notified their eID schemes. Technically speaking, a unified interoperability platform—named eIDAS infrastructure—has been set up to connect the EU countries' national eID schemes to allow a person to authenticate in their home EU country when getting access to services provided by an eIDAS-enabled Service Provider (SP) in another EU country. The eIDAS infrastructure allows the transfer of authentication requests and responses back and forth between its nodes, transporting basic attributes about a person, e.g., name, surname, date of birth, and a so-called eIDAS identifier. However, to build new eIDAS-enabled services in specific domains, additional attributes are needed. We describe our approach to retrieve and transport new attributes through the eIDAS infrastructure, and we detail their exploitation in a selected set of academic services. First, we describe the definition and the support for the additional attributes in the eIDAS nodes. We then present a solution for their retrieval from our university. Finally, we detail the design, implementation, and installation of two eIDAS-enabled academic services at our university: the eRegistration in the Erasmus student exchange program and the Login facility with national eIDs on the university portal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]