Project of the Week - ARIES

Cyberwatching.eu Project of the Week: ARIES, A reliAble euRopean Identity EcoSystem

ARIES Towards Innovative e-ID Services

CyberWatching.eu addresses the need for coordination of European cybersecurity and privacy research & innovation. It defines and promotes a pragmatic approach to implement and maintain an EU observatory for monitoring R&I initiatives on cybersecurity & privacy, throughout EU & Associated Countries’ projects, which will lead to synergies between national, regional and European initiatives in this field.

Project ARIES, reliAble euRopean Identity EcoSystem, is one of the EU Commission funded project that Cyberwatching is promoting and featured as Project of the week for week 4-8 February 2019.

ARIES main goal is to deliver a comprehensive framework for reliable e-identity ecosystem comprising new technologies, processes and security features that ensure highest levels of quality in eID based on trustworthy security documents and biometrics for highly secure and privacy-respecting physical and virtual identity management, with the specific aim to tangibly achieve a reduction in levels of identity theft, fraud and associated crimes.

Innovative contribution to the Cyberwatching.eu community

The government issued electronic identity documents such as e-ID cards or ePassports is now widely extended, secure derivation of credentials and partial or virtual identities from it is still in the early stages. In ARIES we derive virtual identities from government issued document that in its turn rely on breeder documents, such as birth registry or similar, strengthening the links in identity lifecycle. Derived identities are stored in mobile wallet, which remains under users’ control, and user also has a possibility to set up privacy configurations for release of different virtual identities or attributes.

In this way, ARIES combines user-centricity, usability and flexibility with highly secure and privacy-respecting virtual identity management processes.

The project will therefore help to reduce the identity fraud, theft, and associated cyber-crimes, mainly related to the low level of assurance of existing online identities.

Making a difference to potential end-users

While many scalable online identities schemes already exist, there is a lack of solutions that links trusted enrolment, identification and authentication provided by government issued e-ID card or ePassports with scalable and more usable online identities.   The main aim of ARIES is to bridge this gap through establishing of a European electronic identity ecosystem  that builds on top of existing government issued  physical and electronic identity documents such as e-ID cards or ePassports This ecosystem will also involve virtual identity providers, service providers that make use of these ARIES virtual identities, citizens, but also law enforcement authorities that would have access to secure vault where the audit trace, that links government issued e-ID with derived virtual ID, is stored. In this way, citizens profit from the same level of usability they are used to with existing e.g. social network e-IDs, while gaining additional level of security, as well as more control over the storage and release of their identity attributes to service providers, such as hotel chains, rent car companies, banks and others.

Influence investments that can be made in the future Horizon Europe

Setting up of a reliable and sustainable identity ecosystem, that meets all multi-stakeholder requirements such as level of assurance, privacy, scalability or usability, is a holy grail for many initiatives much larger than ARIES.  Other identity ecosystems and infrastructures such as eIDAS, are still in the phase of early adoption, and limited only to basic services, such as mutual recognition of notified e-ID schemes. ARIES opens door to many other innovative e-ID services, such as mutual recognition of identity proofing and verification services, or business model innovations, such as decomposition of identity lifecycle management value chain.

See more articles related to the project, visit their website @www.aries-project.eu.

Read more about Cyberwatchingeu Project of the Week for 4-8 February 2019 on our featured:

• Project of Week page: https://www.cyberwatching.eu/services/catalogue-of-services/project-week-aries
• Events: https://www.cyberwatching.eu/events

See more updates on our social media channels.

Twittter: http://@cyberwatchingeu

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cyber-watching/