About DC4EU

DC4EU will contribute to a new paradigm in identity, data, and the once-only principle to enable the citizens’ perspective.

Digital Credentials For European Union

Europe faces unprecedented changes, in which digital transformation and the green transition are fundamental elements for the future of Europe. The eIDAS trust framework is undoubtedly one of the pillars of the European Union, which has laid the foundations of identity and trust in the digital world. The revision of this framework extends its scope of competence beyond identity, encompassing the electronic attestation of attributes (EAA). Establishing the technical measures, processes, and procedures for establishing trust frameworks in sectoral areas will be crucial to the construction of a digital Europe.

In this sense, DC4EU will focus on identifying and applying all these aspects in the Education field, focusing on the issuance of educational credentials and professional qualifications, and in the Social Security field by engaging in the execution of the portable document A1 (PDA1) and the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC).

The Project’s main objective is to test interoperability and scalability in the national domain and multiple cross-border contexts, to provide feedback to the European Commission (EC) and MSs for iterative updates through specific coordination work packages, project management processes and tasks. The process will allow for comprehensive wallet testing using Qualified Electronic Attestations of Attributes (QEAA), Electronic Attestations of Attributes (EAA) and credentials, and their national and cross-border functionalities in a pre-production environment and correspondent use cases (UCs).

The European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW) will be a fundamental element of hybridization for cross-sectoral and cross-border use cases (identity, signature, educational credentials and social security). DC4EU will contribute to a new paradigm for citizens in the field of education and social security, which is fully aligned with the European Council requirements for identity and data. It will also adhere to the European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles.

Work Packages (WP)

WP1: Project Management and Coordination

This WP, led by the Secretaría General de Administración Digital in Spain, addresses coordination, planning, project management and results measurement with a complete and comprehensive project management model.

WP2: Analysis, Planification and Design

This WP, led by GUNET in Greece, covers the core planning, design and analysis activities.

WP3: Collaboration and Alignment

This WP, led by GRNet in Greece, is responsible for the coordination activities with the European Commission and external stakeholders, including cross-border initiatives such as EBSI, other eIDAS LSPs, Single Digital Gateway (SDG), existing Building Blocks of the European Commission, and related domains initiatives, and services such as European Student Card Initiative, Europass and European Digital Credentials and ESSPASS.

WP4: Onboarding Base Identity

This WP, led by Géant, provides an implementation toolbox for stakeholders, ensuring the complete functionality of the EUDIW.

WP5 & WP6 The Education and The Social Security Domains

To fulfil the large-scale piloting of the EUDIW, WP5, led by the Conferencia de Rectores de las Universidades Españolas and WP6, led by Dachverband der Sozialversicherungsträger, Austria, support the business domain use cases by addressing the Architecture Reference Framework (ARF). This includes onboarding proceedings, identifying business requirements, implementing interfaces for credential issuers, comprehensive business process testing of the target systems and the evaluation of processes.

WP7: Integrations and Development

This WP, led by SUNET, covers the construction of an eIDAS-compliant toolkit for (Q)EEA providers and its continuous integration with the wallet releases with the main objectives of:

Build and distribute a reference open-source implementation for providers and relying parties (issuing and verifying electronic attestations of attributes – EAA, and qualified electronic attestations of attributes – QEAA)
Integration of target systems with reference open-source implementation of others in an interoperability lab

The success of the EU digital wallet will depend on freely available and easy-to-use issuer/verifier implementations. The issuer and verifier will be based on a pluggable architecture that can handle a wide range of signature mechanisms and APIs. We produce an open-source issuer and verifier that presents a standard SIOP2 interface to a relying party, which makes it easy to integrate the EU digital wallet in existing IAM ecosystems via a standard OpenID Connect interface. The interoperability lab will provide a basis for rapid testing of the new EU wallet reference implementation and fast deployment and testing of new features as they are made available.

WP8: Ecosystem building & policy support

This WP, led by VM, from the Ministry of Finance, in Finland, designs ecosystems for each UC to facilitate interoperability across different MS, provide policy support for the UCs and define the business strategy for sustainability.

WP9: Communications & Dissemination

This WP, co-led by the European Campus Card Association (ECCA) and the 3CL Foundation, ensures the project visibility, creates a community of practice, disseminates the findings and leveraging on the extensive networks available to the consortium team members. The KPIs and metrics agreed upon will facilitate prominent awareness and exploitation of the project to realise the potential impact of the project.