Smoothing the Ride: Providing a Seamless Upgrade Path from Established Cross-Border eID Workflows Towards eID Wallet Systems

The eIDAS regulation and its technical implementation successfully enabled cross-border eID use cases within the European Union. Established in 2014 as part of an EU regulation, its technological foundation is starting to show its age, particularly on smartphones. The European Commission (EC) is well aware of this fact, and large-scale pilots for the wallet-based, next-generation pan-European eID framework are on their way. This work fills the gap between both approaches and enables member states to provide wallet-based authentication to established service providers right now. Our prototypical implementation effectively demonstrates that cross-border, wallet-based eID workflows can be rolled out already, while catering towards the constraints of already operational infrastructure. We achieve this by introducing an eIDAS app, which supports both existing eIDAS-based cross-border authentication as well as interaction with wallet apps.