The Austrian Identity Ecosystem

Architectures and protocols for secure information technology are crucial to satisfy security requirements of current e-government solutions. Identity plays a central role in most e-government solutions, as users typically need to be reliably identified and authenticated. User identification and authentication approaches usually rely on complex cryptographic methods and sophisticated technical solutions. Additionally, these solutions need to be backed by appropriate organizational and legal frameworks that assure the legal validity of provided identification and authentication approaches. In this chapter, the authors introduce the Austrian identity ecosystem that represents one of the main pillars of the Austrian e-government infrastructure. They discuss underlying concepts and main building blocks of this comprehensive ecosystem and show how architectures and protocols for secure information technology are employed to assure the security of user identification and authentication processes. By discussing concrete use cases, the authors illustrate the applicability of the Austrian identity ecosystem for both Austrian and foreign citizens.