ATEMA: An attribute enablement module for attribute retrieval and transfer through the eIDAS Network

The electronic identities for natural persons become increasingly important to build services both at national level or in cross-border scenarios. To efficiently and securely handle them, several European Union (EU) Member State countries have developed various electronic identity systems. The eIDAS Network (implementing the European eIDAS Regulation 910/2014) connects such systems in a unified Pan-European infrastructure to allow citizens’ access to cross-border services within EU with their national authentication credentials. While the eIDAS Network as well as the main actors involved (eIDAS-Nodes, Identity and Service Providers) are known, its integration with entities providing other citizen attributes to the eIDAS Network is still an open issue.We propose ATEMA, an attribute enablement module, which combines citizen authentication via eIDAS Network with the retrieval of additional citizen data from national Attribute Providers. ATEMA implements two different solutions exploiting different technologies and standards to support the user consent management and the authorization of the released data, like the OAuth 2.0 protocol. With a prototype implementation, we detail the two solutions and their integration with the Italian eIDAS-Node and with an Attribute Provider at Politecnico di Torino (Italy) providing academic attributes.