Towards a Pan European e-ID Interoperability Infrastructure

The proliferation of e-services in most European countries has been favorable to the emergence of common identity providers and national identity management infrastructures in these countries. The STORK project aims to interconnect all of these identity management infra-structures to form a pan-European federated e-identity space. In this paper we show that due to two different identity concepts in use by the European countries, this objective is a far from trivial challenge. Based on our analysis we present two scenarios: homogeneous interoperability for countries with alike identity concepts and heterogeneous interoperability for countries with different identity concepts. For the latter case we present three solution directions to overcome technical limitations and challenges.The STORK project is co-funded by the European union and will deliver real solutions by implementing five demo projects.