eID System Research Articles

Field demonstration analyzing the implementation of individual animal electronic identification and genetic testing in western range sheep flocks.

Adoption of electronic identification ear tags (EID) and DNA testing by commercial range sheep producers in the Western United States has been low, despite the availability of these technologies for over a decade. Jointly, these technologies offer an approach to provide individual animal performance data to improve flock health, genetic and reproductive management. This project involved a collaboration with five California sheep producers representing a broad geographic range, varying levels of pre-project EID adoption, and diverse operational practices. Tissue samples were collected from, and ear EIDs were placed in, a total of 2,936 rams and their potential lambs. We partnered with a commercial packing company, Superior Farms, to genotype the animals. Superior Farms used a targeted genotyping panel to assign parentage, and link individual animal identification (ID) to camera-graded carcass measurements. This enabled the collection of individual progeny carcass data and provided insight into sire performance, providing for the within-flock identification of prolific sires that were producing lambs with significantly more saleable meat as compared to their flock mates. Overall, almost 91% of lambs were successfully matched to their sire, and prolificacy ranging from 0-135 lambs per ram. There was as much as an $80 difference in the average edible product from camera-graded carcasses derived from lamb groups sired by different rams. A partial budget analysis modeling investment in an EID system coupled with an autodrafter and scale to collect individual weights and improve labor efficiency during processing, and a sheep flip chute to improve worker safety during foot trimmings, yielded a greater than 7:1 return on investment over a five-year time frame. Ideally, the data collection enabled by EIDs and DNA testing would feed into data-driven genetic evaluation programs to enable selection for more productive and profitable animals, and allow the US sheep industry to accelerate the rate of genetic improvement.

Generalized predictive speed control based on equivalent-input-disturbance for PMSM drive system

The speed control performance of permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drive system is degraded due to non-matching disturbances such as parameter perturbation and load torque mutation. This paper presents a nonlinear generalized predictive control method based on equivalent-input-disturbance (GPC-based-EID) to realize the fast response and strong robustness of the speed controller of the PMSM drive system. Firstly, the continuous time nonlinear system of a motor mechanical equation is established. A speed controller based on the generalized predictive theory rather than the PI controller of a traditional vector control is designed. Then, the drive system with disturbance is transformed into an EID system. An improved nonsingular fast terminal sliding-mode observer (NFTSMO) is introduced to accurately estimate the EID of total system non-matching disturbances. And the active compensation of non-matching disturbances is realized through feedforward method. This greatly enhances the robustness and the speed tracking performance of the drive system. Comparisons with PI control, traditional GPC and GPC-based-ESO methods show the effectiveness of the method.

New Principles for Governing Aadhaar: Improving Access and Inclusion, Privacy, Security, and Identity Management

Legal identification for all by 2030 is a global strategic goal under the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 16.9). Legal identification is perceived as a critical element in increasing people’s participation in society and providing them with access to services that can improve their quality of life. Aadhaar, India’s digital identity programme, is the world’s largest identity project aimed at providing foundational ID and access to state welfare across the nation. By 2019, 1.2 billion people had a registered Aadhaar card. National and state welfare services, and increasingly, a host of private sector services, are linked to Aadhaar. However, India’s eID programme has faced significant civil and judicial resistance over matters of privacy, fraud, welfare exclusion and surveillance. This technology assessment focusses on evaluating Aadhaar using four lenses: the accessibility of Aadhaar and its impact on welfare distribution, privacy concerns and contestations, security issues associated with the Aadhaar architecture, and finally the efficacy of identity management processes. Aadhaar’s growing prominence in public and private sector services means that the risks and vulnerabilities in the technology also become embedded in the socio-economic fabric of society. This paper discusses how the current efforts to address highlighted risks are insufficient and drive distrust in the system. This paper concludes by providing recommendations that can help address existing issues. Improving civil society participation in Aadhaar’s current and future direction can help foster trust in the Aadhaar ecosystem. Digital rights training presents an avenue to educate all Aadhaar stakeholders on their data rights, digital risks, and mitigation strategies. Formalizing UIDAI as an independent authority, not tied to the central government, can also improve the transparency and governance of Aadhaar and provide a pathway for greater participation across public sector, private sector and civil society actors and can provide opportunities to develop acceptable innovations on top of the eID system.

Responsible innovation for digital identity systems

Abstract Digital identity (eID) systems are a crucial piece in the digital services ecosystem. They connect individuals to a variety of socioeconomic opportunities but can also reinforce power asymmetries between organizations and individuals. Data collection practices can negatively impact an individual’s right to privacy, autonomy, and self-determination. Protecting individual rights, however, may be at odds with imperatives of profit maximization or national security. The use of eID technologies is hence highly contested. Current approaches to governing eID systems have been unable to fully address the trade-offs between the opportunities and risks associated with these systems. The responsible innovation (RI) literature provides a set of principles to govern disruptive innovations, such as eID systems, toward societally desirable outcomes. This article uses RI principles to develop a framework to govern eID systems in a more inclusive, responsible, and user-centered manner. The proposed framework seeks to complement existing practices for eID system governance by bringing forth principles of deliberation and democratic engagement to build trust amongst stakeholders of the eID system and deliver shared socioeconomic benefits.

Electronic identity services as sociotechnical and political-economic constructs

Electronic identification services (eIDs) have become strategic services in the global governance of online societies. In this article, we argue that eIDs are sociotechnical constructs that also have political-economic dimensions. In the European context, governmental and corporate efforts to develop eIDs are shaped by legal EU frameworks, which are almost exclusively focussed on technical and legal interoperability, such as the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and the European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA). Public concerns such as privacy, security, user empowerment and control over one’s personal information prompts developers to propose a decentralized, attribute-based system governed on a nonprofit, nonstate basis (DAN-eID). To illustrate our argument, we explore a single emerging eID system (IRMA; acronym for I Reveal My Attributes) that is developing in a national context (The Netherlands). We argue that developing eIDs requires more than engineering ingenuity and legal compliance; as sociotechnical and political-economic constructs, they involve negotiation of conflicting social and political values.

A Mobile Identity Management System to Enhance the Brazilian Electronic Government

One of the strategies used by governments to enhance eGovernment Programs (eGov) is to define an Electronic Identity Management (IdM) system. Brazil has not yet defined a National Strategy for Identity Management. This work aims to propose a Mobile Identity Management (Mobile eID) System aligned with the Brazilian eGov Program, through a solution that prioritizes security, privacy and usability. As a proof of concept, a prototype was developed in software, which was evaluated through functional test cases and a user satisfaction survey. The results show that it is possible to guarantee the security, privacy and the usability of the Mobile eID through the use of FIDO UAF, TEE and SAML standards.

Piloting very early infant diagnosis of HIV in Lesotho: Acceptability and feasibility among mothers, health workers and laboratory personnel.

IntroductionMortality associated with in-utero HIV infection rises rapidly within weeks after birth. Very early infant diagnosis of HIV (VEID)–testing within 2 weeks of birth–followed by immediate initiation of antiretroviral therapy has potential to avert mortality associated with in-utero transmission. However, our understanding of acceptability and feasibility of VEID is limited.MethodsVEID was piloted in an observational prospective cohort of HIV-positive pregnant women and their infants in 13 Lesotho health facilities. Between March-July 2016, semi-structured interviews were conducted with HIV-positive women attending 6-week or 14-week postnatal visits and health workers (HWs) in 8 study facilities in 3 districts as well as with district and central laboratory staff. Interview themes included acceptability of birth and subsequent HIV testing and early treatment, perceived VEID challenges, and HIV birth testing procedures and how well they were performed.ResultsInterviews were conducted with 20 women, 18 HWs and 9 district/central laboratory staff. Nearly all mothers perceived knowing their child’s HIV status at birth positively. Mothers and HWs did not indicate that birth testing affected subsequent acceptance of infant HIV testing or clinic attendance. HWs and laboratory staff reported weak follow-up systems for mothers with home deliveries, and concern regarding the increased workload associated with additional testing requirements. All groups reported turnaround time delays for EID, and that sometimes results were never received.ConclusionsWomen, HWs, and laboratory staff found VEID acceptable and were supportive of national implementation of birth testing. However, they identified challenges within the EID system that could be exacerbated by adding a test to the diagnostic algorithm, such as delays in receiving test results, suggesting VEID may not be feasible in certain settings. Policymakers will need to consider whether adding birth testing or strengthening the current clinic and laboratory system is the most appropriate course of action.

Federated Identity Architecture of the European eID System

Federated identity management is a method that facilitates management of identity processes and policies among the collaborating entities without a centralized control. Nowadays, there are many federated identity solutions, however, most of them covers different aspects of the identification problem, solving in some cases specific problems. Thus, none of these initiatives has consolidated as a unique solution and surely it will remain like that in a near future. To assist users choosing a possible solution, we analyze different federated identify approaches, showing main features, and making a comparative study among them. The former problem is even worst when multiple organizations or countries already have legacy eID systems, as it is the case of Europe. In this paper, we also present the European eID solution, a purely federated identity system that aims to serve almost 500 million people and that could be extended in mid-term also to eID companies. The system is now being deployed at the EU level and we present the basic architecture and evaluate its performance and scalability, showing that the solution is feasible from the point of view of performance while keeping security constrains in mind. The results show a good performance of the solution in local, organizational, and remote environments.

STORK: a real, heterogeneous, large-scale eID management system

Verifying who someone is on the Internet is a prerequisite for online services that process sensitive or valuable information. While this has been solved with national or sectorial electronic identification (eID) schemes, general, cross-border solutions are rare. Cross-border eID difficulties have several origins: (i) incompatible national eID models; (ii) different legislations with incompatible objectives; (iii) lack of common language and semantics; (iv) different common procedures, specially in what concerns mandates and delegation; (v) different implementations of the same eID models. These have been addressed by STORK, a project that developed a federated cross-border eID system that was piloted in about twenty European Union Member States in service sectors as sensitive as eBanking and eHealth. STORK designed and implemented a large-scale interoperability framework, allowing different systems of different models to coexist, using a common language with a common semantics and satisfying national privacy legislations. The experience gained from this large-scale pilot fed into EU policy-making, in particular, the recently enacted eIDAS Regulation requiring mutual recognition of eID by 2018 has been directly influenced by STORK and its lessons learned.

Employing Ontology-Alignment and Locality-Sensitive Hashing to Improve Attribute Interoperability in Federated eID Systems

Achieving interoperability, i.e. creating identity federations between different Electronic identities (eID) systems, has gained relevance throughout the past years. A serious problem of identity federations is the missing harmonization between various attribute providers (APs). In closed eID systems, ontologies allow a higher degree of automation in the process of aligning and aggregating attributes from different APs. This approach does not work for identity federations, as each eID system uses its own ontology to represent its attributes. Furthermore, providing attributes to intermediate entities required to align and aggregate attributes potentially violates privacy rules. To tackle these problems, we propose the use of combined ontology-alignment (OA) approaches and locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) functions. We assess existing implementations of these concepts defining and using criteria that are special for identity federations. Obtained results confirm that proper implementations of these concepts exist and that they can be used to achieve interoperability between eID systems on attribute level. A prototype is implemented showing that combining the two assessment winners (AlignAPI for ontology-alignment and Nilsimsa for LSH functions) achieves interoperability between eID systems. In addition, the improvement obtained in the alignment process by combining the two assessment winners does not impact negatively the privacy of the user’s data, since no clear-text data is exchanged in the alignment process.

A High-Resolution Imaging Technique using a Whole-body, Research Photon Counting Detector CT System.

A high-resolution (HR) data collection mode has been introduced to the whole-body, research photon-counting-detector CT system installed in our laboratory. In this mode, 64 rows of 0.45 mm × 0.45 mm detectors pixels were used, which corresponded to a pixel size of 0.225 mm × 0.225 mm at the iso-center. Spatial resolution of this HR mode was quantified by measuring the MTF from a scan of a 50 micron wire phantom. An anthropomorphic lung phantom, cadaveric swine lung, temporal bone and heart specimens were scanned using the HR mode, and image quality was subjectively assessed by two experienced radiologists. Comparison of the HR mode images against their energy integrating system (EID) equivalents using comb filters was also performed. High spatial resolution of the HR mode was evidenced by the MTF measurement, with 15 lp/cm and 20 lp/cm at 10% and 2% MTF. Images from anthropomorphic phantom and cadaveric specimens showed clear delineation of small structures, such as lung vessels, lung nodules, temporal bone structures, and coronary arteries. Temporal bone images showed critical anatomy (i.e. stapes superstructure) that was clearly visible in the PCD system but hardly visible with the EID system. These results demonstrated the potential application of this imaging mode in lung, temporal bone, and vascular imaging. Other clinical applications that require high spatial resolution, such as musculoskeletal imaging, may also benefit from this high resolution mode.

The Austrian eID ecosystem in the public cloud: How to obtain privacy while preserving practicality

The Austrian eID system constitutes a main pillar within the Austrian e-Government strategy. The eID system ensures unique identification and secure authentication for citizens protecting access to applications where sensitive and personal data are involved. In particular, the Austrian eID system supports three main use cases: identification and authentication of Austrian citizens, electronic representation, and foreign citizen authentication at Austrian public sector applications. For supporting all these use cases, several components — either locally deployed in the applications' domain or centrally deployed — need to communicate with each other. While local deployments have some advantages in terms of scalability, still a central deployment of all involved components would be advantageous, e.g., due to less maintenance efforts. However, a central deployment can easily lead to load bottlenecks because theoretically the whole Austrian population as well as — for foreign citizens — the whole EU population could use the provided services. To mitigate the issue on scalability, in this paper we propose the migration of the main components of the ecosystem into a public cloud. However, a move of trusted services into a public cloud brings up new obstacles, particularly with respect to privacy. To bypass the issue on privacy, in this paper we propose an approach on how the complete Austrian eID ecosystem can be moved into a public cloud in a privacy-preserving manner by applying selected cryptographic technologies (in particular using proxy re-encryption and redactable signatures). Applying this approach, no sensitive data will be disclosed to a public cloud provider by still supporting all three main eID system use cases. We finally discuss our approach based on selected criteria.

Design strategies for a privacy-friendly Austrian eID system in the public cloud

Secure identification and authentication are essential processes in sensitive areas of application such as e-Government or e-Health. In Austria, the official eID is the so called the Austrian citizen card and a means of choice for secure citizen identification and authentication. To facilitate the adoption of citizen card authentication at service providers within the Austrian e-Government strategy, the open source module MOA-ID has been developed. It acts as identity provider for different service providers and manages identification and authentication based on the Austrian citizen card. Currently, MOA-ID is deployed locally in every service provider's domain and is assumed to be fully trusted. With the increasing use of eIDs, however, a move into a public cloud might be advantageous due to benefits provided cloud computing, e.g., cost savings or scalability. Nevertheless, the move of a trusted service into the public cloud brings up new obstacles, in particular with respect to security and privacy. Therefore, in this paper we introduce and evaluate three different approaches on how the Austrian eID system based on MOA-ID could be securely moved into the cloud without violating any privacy or data protection aspects. To achieve this, we rely on various cryptographic methods and focus on minimum changes of the current identification and authentication process flow. Based on an evaluation of these three different approaches, we propose a model which can be generically used for eID identification and authentication in privacy-invasive environments such as the public cloud.

EID System's Privacy Protection Enhancement Design

Recently, eID system is proposed to settle security problems and even more important to fulfill the need of government administration and control. But the main obstacle of spreading eID systems is privacy worrying though they possessed some security and privacy protection measures. In this paper, we provided the enhancement design for protecting citizen privacy in an eID system (taking German eID system as analysis object).Firstly, we suggested to separate authorization eID server and authentication eID server physically to reduce the possibility of personal data breach since eID server could not avoid to be attacked if it was one part of the internet ; Secondly, we put forward that privacy data should be double-encrypted in the stage of applying service, and should be remain encryption except the service program using it, and more importantly , it should be deleted when service is ending ; Thirdly, in order to prevent fake eID server plus fake service provider attack, we devised the authentication flow when citizen access service which let citizen to take part in the authentication process actively. In addition, we present the remote delete personal data process which invoked by citizen to further privacy protection.

Electroimmunodiffusion on cellulose acetate: A rapid method for analysis of bovine lactoferrin in chromatography effluents

The cellulose acetate EID method is described in terms of the dynamic behavior of the system relative to electrophoresis time, antiserum concentration, and antigen concentration. As expected, the behavior of the system is virtually identical to the agarose EID system described by Laurell (4). The method has been applied to the direct quantitation of the milk iron-binding protein lactoferrin and its use in determining the elution profile of this nonenzymatic protein from chromatography effluents has been demonstrated. Guidelines are given for the development of the assay toward other proteins.