eIDAS: Facilitate seamless digital transactions among individuals and businesses across the EU
European Commission 2018
The European Union Agency for Network and Information Society (ENISA) has published a report on the implementation and uptake of Trust Services in Europe.
The study concluded that while Regulation (EU) N°910/2014 on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market (the eIDAS Regulation) has been seen by stakeholders as a key enabler towards digital transformation, organisations across the board can be greatly facilitated and encouraged to deliver their strategies with confidence should they chose to follow the eIDAS framework.
The eIDAS Regulation, adopted by the co-legislators on 23 July 2014, is a milestone to provide a predictable regulatory environment to enable secure and seamless electronic interactions between businesses, citizens and public authorities.
The eIDAS Regulation underpins three of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Building Blocks: eID, eSignature and eDelivery. The CEF Building Blocks offer basic capabilities that can be reused in any European project to facilitate the delivery of digital public services across borders and sectors.
- The CEF eID Building Block is a set of services (including software, documentation, training and support) provided by the European Commission and endorsed by the Member States, which helps public administrations and private Service Providers to extend the use of their online services to citizens from other European countries, by allowing them to identify and authenticate with their national eID. The mutual recognition of eID schemes across Europe is mandated by the eIDAS Regulation.
- The CEF eSignature Building Block helps public administrations and businesses to accelerate the creation and verification of electronic signatures. The deployment of solutions based on this building block in a Member State facilitates the mutual recognition and cross-border interoperability of e-signatures. The eIDAS legal framework ensures legal certainty for cross-border use of e-signatures, e-seals, time-stamps, eDelivery service and website authentication certificates.
- CEF eDelivery is a network of nodes for digital communications. It is based on a distributed model where every participant becomes a node using standard transport protocols and security policies. It helps public administrations to exchange electronic data and documents with other public administrations, businesses and citizens, in an interoperable, secure, reliable and trusted way. eIDAS establishes the principle that an electronic document should not be denied legal effect on the grounds that it is in an electronic form. Having this objective in mind, it introduces Electronic Registered Delivery Service (ERDS) as a new trust service. CEF eDelivery is fully compliant with the ERDS defined in eIDAS.
ENISA conducted the study to present an overview of the implementation and uptake of Trust Services defined in the eIDAS Regulation one year after adoption to the new regime, and analyse the new opportunities and incentives introduced in the European Trust Services market.
The survey recently carried out by ENISA marks the positive tendency of Trust services to break through the barriers of large-scale business transformation processes in such applications as finance, healthcare and beyond.