Council of the EU's Information Exchange Platform with Member States

CEF in the EU institutions

The Council Information Exchange Platform (CIxP), created by the Council of the EU, is a platform to exchange documents securely between the Council of the EU and Member States. CIxP started in 2016 and has received continuous support from CEF eDelivery throughout the project.

CIxP replaces the current document distribution service (EXTRANET/U32Mail) with Systems-to-System (S2S) service. S2S will provide and consume both the GSC and the Council Members' back office.

The S2S information exchange solutions generally have three capabilities:

• sending documents
• receiving documents
• accessing data repositories in order to obtain data

CEF eDelivery support:  

The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eDelivery Building Block enables CIxP to send and receive documents. In the General Secretariat of the Council, a Web Services API will be exposed, allowing for integration of the Information knowledge base backend systems to both retrieve and send information. With non-repudiation at the core of its design, CEF eDelivery will be used as the framework solution for the secure and reliable exchange of documents between the GSC and the Council Members.

The CEF eDelivery Building Block enables heterogeneous systems to interact with each other in a secure, reliable and trusted way.

With this approach, in the future, other partners such as acceding states, could be served with a similar service with some predefined constraints enforcing the information (documents and metadata) access rules.

Currently only non classified information is included in the scope of the project implementation, however, In the longer term this project can act as an enabler for the phasing out of the EXTRANET WAN infrastructure and a move towards information/document dissemination over the Internet for classified information as well (up to RESTREINT-UE/EU-RESTRICTED).

• By using the CEF eDelivery Building Block, the GSC were able to get a jump start because all the requirements for the document exchange capability were met right off the bat:
  • Payload Agnostic: Any payload can be exchanged;
  • Message Integrity: Messages are secured against any modification during transmission;
  • Message Confidentiality: Messages are encrypted during transmission;
  • Sender Identification: The identity of the sender should be verified;
  • Recipient/Addressee Identification:  Recipient / addressee Identity is verified before the delivery of the message;
  • Proof of Send/Receive: Sender and receiver of the message are provided with evidence of message recipient and deliver (non-repudiation).

The GSC did some additional developments in order to provide a more business/functional monitoring information to parties exchanging information/documents:

• A extension of the JMS plugin provided by the European Commission's Directorate General for Informatics (DIGIT);
• A web interface for the monitoring of document exchanges.

CIxP is currently running a pilot, intended to fine-tune the deployment. And plans to start migrating from the old system to the new (CIxP) system in January 2019. Furthermore, GSC intends to reuse the same solution to transmit RESTRICTED-EU information.

Read more about CEF eDelivery

Find out more

Explore More Success Stories and Content