Approaching the Challenge of eID Interoperability: An Austrian Perspective

eGovernment is a key enabler for efficient public administrations and user-friendly governmental procedures. Electronic identities (eID) are crucial for any eGovernment infrastructure
as they allow for the remote identification of citizens during online processes. Most EU Member States have already rolled out eIDs for their citizens on a national level. Due to country-specific legal, social, and technical requirements, existing national eID solutions are usually not interoperable.
In a converging European society, cross-border applicability of eID based services is of increasing importance. To overcome existing limitations, the European Commission has launched
the large scale pilot STORK, which aims to establish an eID interoperability layer based on existing national solutions.
Integration of this interoperability layer into existing national eID infrastructures raises various challenges on a technical, organisational and legal level. In this article we focus on the
Austrian situation and show how the faced challenges have been overcome. We discuss both the Austrian national eID infrastructure and the STORK interoperability layer and show
how these two components have been smoothly combined in order to open the Austrian eGovernment landscape for European citizens