Electronic identification

Related articles

• Common Access Card
• Smartcards

An electronic identification ("eID") is an electronic identification solution of citizens or organizations, for example in view to access benefits or services provided by government authorities, banks or other companies. Apart from online authentication many eICs also give users the option to sign electronic documents with a digital signature.

Installation

a All types of electronic identification require installing the ccid package. After installation, enable, and start pcscd.socket. In addition, ACS smart cards also require the acsccid package.

pcsc-tools contains pcsc_scan program that can be used to check smart card detection Smartcards#Scan for card reader.

Setup per country

Belgium

https://eid.belgium.be/en

Install the eid-mw^AUR package. Before installation, import the (continuous build) keys from [1]. See makepkg#Signature checking.

There is no plugin for Chrome, but there is one for Firefox. Add the Firefox plugin to your browser. In recent versions, you'll need to manually add the eID module to the Firefox security devices configuration. Your module path might be different than the one in the guide. List the different devices by doing:

# p11tool --list-tokens

Here you'll see the module, which might be beidpkcs11.so. Now to find the full path you do:

# find /usr/lib -name beidpkcs11.so

You should now be able to use your eID reader in Firefox. Try it out using the test page.

You may find hints for troubleshooting in the official documentation but keep in mind that Arch Linux is not officially supported.

Estonia

See https://www.id.ee/?lang=en

DigiDoc

Once ccid is installed and pcscd.socket is started, install qdigidoc4^AUR. One of the dependency xml-security-c^AUR is verified with a signature that you have to import to your GnuPG keyring. If you have an ACS card reader, acsccid is required.

DigiDoc4 has an optional GNOME/Files right click menu integration. Install python2-nautilus^{AUR[broken link: package not found]} and restart Gnome Files using the command pkill nautilus.

Note: chrome-token-signing^AUR contains the "Token signing" extension that allows digital signatures on the web for both Google Chrome/Chromium and Firefox.

Chromium

After installing chrome-token-signing^AUR, enable the PIN 1 authentication in Google Chrome and Chromium by running the following command (taken from the open-eid repo).

 modutil -dbdir sql:$HOME/.pki/nssdb -add opensc-pkcs11 -libfile onepin-opensc-pkcs11.so -mechanisms FRIENDLY

Firefox

To enable PIN 1 authentication in Firefox you should install esteidpkcs11loader^AUR and chrome-token-signing^AUR. After restarting the browser make sure that "Firefox PKCS11 loader" extension is enabled. You can also follow manual instructions at Smartcards#Mozilla Firefox.

For new cards issued since December 2018

The opensc-git^AUR package provides drivers for EstEID 2018+ [2].

Note: qdigidoc4 requires opensc but you need to remove it before installing opensc-git. To work around this, just force remove opensc with `pacman -Rdd opensc`.

Currently the default pkcs11 provider for Chrome is unsuitable (it asks PIN2 on authentication) (see [3]). Fix it by

1. deleting ~/.pki/nssdb/pkcs11.txt
2. running /usr/bin/pkcs11-register -m /usr/lib/onepin-opensc-pkcs11.so
3. and appending -m /usr/lib/onepin-opensc-pkcs11.so to the Exec line of /etc/xdg/autostart/pkcs11-register.desktop.

Germany

ReinerSCT devices

Install pcsc-cyberjack^AUR and copy the default configuration file /etc/pcsc-cyberjack/cyberjack.conf.default to the same folder, without default. Restart pcsc.service and apps like ausweisapp2^AUR should recognize the scanner. The ReinerSCT RFID will blink its LED, which it does not when the driver is not installed correctly.

Sweden

BankID is the leading electronic identification in Sweden.