After a surprisingly clear defeat of the e-ID proposal in the national referendum early March 2021, the federal administration presented plans for a new attempt a month ago with a discussion paper on the target vision for an e-ID (DE, FR).
SWITCH is taking a stand and handed in a position statement end of September 2021 on this discussion paper in German: Stellungnahme SWITCH Zielbild E-ID final_sig.
Continue reading “Swiss E-ID, take two – SWITCH takes a stand”
On 7 March, Switzerland rejected proposed legislation to establish an e-ID.
As a neutral and independent foundation for Swiss universities, SWITCH has over 20 years’ experience in the field of electronic identities and participated in the process of designing the e-ID. We interviewed Christoph Graf, Programme Manager of SWITCH edu-ID, about the next steps in introducing an e-ID in Switzerland and the role SWITCH can play in this process.
Read more.
SWITCH invites you on Wed, 15 May 2019 to the 2nd Trust & Identity WG Meeting combined with the SWITCH edu-ID Update Event in Berne.
Registration is open until Tue, 7. May 2019 and required for logistical reasons.
Refer to the registration page for the draft agenda and schedule.
A longer section of the event is dedicated to SWITCH edu-ID. The heads of IT of University of Lucerne and Distance University will talk about their adoption experience.
Administrators of either an Identity Provider or Service Provider registered in SWITCHaai as well as the SWITCHpki registration authority operators and all persons involved in (future) planning and adoption of SWITCH edu-ID are invited to participate.
What’s the SWITCH Trust & Identity WG?
The SWITCH Trust & Identity WG comprises representatives of all SWITCHaai Participants and SWITCHpki Participants in the SWITCH Community and the Extended SWITCH Community.
This group is informally involved with the further development of SWITCHaai/edu-ID and SWITCHpki and has the opportunity to provide feedback if there are questions or changes upcoming.
Creating a new law is a long journey. We already featured several “making of” stages of the Swiss E-ID Law and the contributions of SWITCH in our E-ID category: consultation of an E-ID Concept in 2015, consultation of an early draft E-ID Law in 2017, publication of proposed law in 2018.
Another hurdle was recently cleared with the National Council approving the proposed law with relatively minor changes in March 2019 (for the interested: this business is referenced under 18.049). A minority wanted to change to government-issued Electronic Identities (eIDs), but the proposed market model was upheld.
Next step is the debate in the Commission of Legal Affairs of the Council of States in April 2019. In the absence of major changes, the law can be put in force in 2021.
At its meeting on 1 June 2018, the Federal Council adopted a dispatch to Parliament containing a draft for an E-ID law (see corresponding press release in DE, FR and IT; for follow-ups see “18.049 Business of the Federal Council”).
The National Council’s legal commission now runs the business. On 15.11.2018, it held a hearing with representatives of industry, public corporations, potential providers of E-ID solutions and interested parties from civil society. As a potential provider, SWITCH was able to take part in this hearing.
This draft E-ID law largely follows the preliminary draft consulted last year (press release with link to consultation report at page bottom). It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that the position of SWITCH expressed towards the preliminary draft also applies to the new draft law – including the criticism voiced therein. Continue reading “E-ID law: SWITCH contributing to parliamentary hearing”
The SWITCH identity federation was conceived almost two decades ago. The SWITCHaai service, implementing its concepts, has been in operation for over a decade. Today, the SWITCH edu-ID service is in its initial stages to become its successor, and it is still following the same model: to stay the identity federation of the Swiss academic community. That is reason enough to address those two rather fundamental questions:
Both question the remits of the current solution: national and academic. But they differ in perspective: while the first is questioning the national remit, the second is questioning the academic-only context. Continue reading “The SWITCH identity federation – a look beyond its borders”
Is one password for everything the right way? Could E-ID be a suitable solution to facilitate users life? Christoph Graf discusses such questions and explains how SWITCH edu-ID fits in the ID landscape and what our expectations about E-ID would be. Read more (in German)
At its meeting on 22 February 2017, the Swiss Federal Council opened a consultation on legislation on electronic identification (E-ID law, see announcements: DE, FR, IT). The consultation ended 29 May 2017.
SWITCH participated in this consultation and confirms the importance of a well-functioning and generally accepted E-ID. The identity service SWITCH edu-ID/SWITCHaai could potentially benefit from such an E-ID legislation: either to start offering an E-ID function itself, or by consuming E-ID services. Such use cases – from SWITCH and from other parties – may become important drivers for the spread of E-ID beyond pure e-government applications and for the emergence of an general-purpose E-ID ecosystem.
After evaluating the proposed delivery model in the draft E-ID-law, SWITCH proposes its revision. To ensure swift implementation and to reduce risks and complexity, SWITCH urges that the proposed market model be abandoned in favour of an implementation by the Swiss Confederation itself or by mandating it to a third party.
If the market model is to be pursued nevertheless, SWITCH proposes the use of a multi-stakeholder expert group to resolve the many open questions arising from the draft. If this group can not achieve its objectives, the market model is to be abandoned once and for all in favour of the proposed government-driven implementation model for an E-ID.
You are invited to read the full answer of SWITCH to the consultation (in German): 20170529 Vernehmlassungsantwort SWITCH E-ID-Gesetzesentwurf.
This is one of the questions we answer quite often – and the answer is “yes”. Of course we do observe initiatives within Switzerland (mainly eGovernment related) and abroad, and including international projects with common tasks and possible synergies. In addition to simply monitor what others do, we build relationships, exchange know-how, evaluate eID initiatives of other National research and education networks (NRENs), provide advice for groups who only yet start with federation projects, and SWITCH is active in international projects as GEANT.
Hereafter you find some examples of initiatives and projects, their goals and concepts, common activities (if any), and some ideas about common interests or possible synergies.
Imagine you get a Swiss electronic identity. What should it look like?
Fedpol asked the Swiss edu-ID team to comment on their concept of a federal eID.
A starting point
In Sweden more than 50% of citizens already have an eID – an identity originally issued by the private sector (as banks) and developed further towards a standardised identity assertion and a more federated approach. Meanwhile, in Switzerland the foundation for a federal electronic identity will now be laid by presenting an eID concept to the Federal Council and then by starting the process to implement it in law.
As e-identities are widely used in Switzerland and also issued by several organisations (SuisseID, MobileID, Swiss edu-ID etc.), in May 2015 the Federal Office of Police (fedpol) started a consultation about the proposed eID concept. SWITCH provided our statement among a group of 68 companies and institutions with expertise in Identity Management. Now the interpretation of the answers and conclusions are available.