International conference for Open Source and Identity Management in Stuttgart
In the context of the annually Open Identity Summit (http://openidentity.eu) international experts met from November 4th to 6th 2014 in Stuttgart, to discuss current and future trends with respect to Open Source, Identity Management and Cloud Computing. One important thematic focus of the conference was the secure and user-friendly application of eID cards.
Version 1.1 of the Open eCard App supports numerous smart cards
As explained in „An extensible platform for eID, signatures and more“ (http://openecard.org/platform), the highly extensible version 1.1 of the platform independent Open eCard App is based on the international standard ISO/IEC 24727 for electronic identification cards and hence supports any smart card, which is described by an XML-based CardInfo file. Thereby the German eID card (“elektronischer Personalausweis”), the German eHealth Card (“elektronische Gesundheitskarte”), the Austrian social insurance card (e-card), the Estonian Identity Card, the „e-Arztausweis light“ issued by the Medical Association Nordrhein, and different signature and banking cards issued by D-Trust, DATEV, S-Trust and GAD are currently supported. Beyond that it is easy to provide application specific add-ons, which can be plugged into the extensible Open eCard platform and allow to support electronic signature functionality for example.
Source released under GPL and Linux still supported
The source code of the Open eCard App is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 and is available at http://source.openecard.org/ as usual. Unlike the “AusweisApp2”, which recently has been released for trial purposes, the platform independent Open eCard App of course can still be used on Linux and continues to support the old and the new mechanism for eID-activation.
Open eCard Team calls for contribution!
The Open eCard Team is an open community, which invites interested citizens and organizations to participate. To support the development of the Open eCard App, you can join the Open eCard Team at http://join.openecard.org.
About the Open eCard project
The Open eCard Team consists of industrial and academic experts, who have joined forces to provide an Open Source and platform-independent implementation of ISO/IEC 24727, such that arbitrary applications can easily access arbitrary smart cards for authentication and signature purposes. A first result of the project is the Open eCard App, which provides an Open Source alternative to proprietary eID clients.
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Contact
Dr. Detlef Hühnlein
Project Manager Open eCard
c/o ecsec GmbH
Sudetenstraße 16
96247 Michelau, Germany
E-Mail: info@openecard.org
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