Towards Electronic Identification and Trusted Services for Biometric Authenticated Transactions in the Single Euro Payments Area

On 14th October 2013 the European Parliament Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) paved the way on the regulation and harmonisation for electronic identification, authentication and trust services (eIDAS) between EU member states. This upcoming regulation will ensure mutual recognition and acceptance of electronic identification across borders, which also provides an opportunity to establish trusted electronic transactions in the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). The contribution of the presented paper is twofold: on the one hand we discuss the adaption of the upcoming eIDAS standard towards trusted banking transactions and outline resulting security and privacy enhancements; on the other hand we extend the eIDAS standard by biometric authenticated transactions which not only boost user convenience, trust and confidence towards eBanking and eBusiness, but suggest to integrate state-of-the-art privacy compliant biometric technologies into the security ecosystem, which is promoted by both, the European Payment Council (EPC) and the European Banking Union (EBU). As a result we identify eIDAS as highly suitable for banking transactions since it is solely based on security protocols and infrastructure which have been for more than ten years proven secure in the civil aviation domain.