Secure Communication Using Electronic Identity Cards for Voice over IP Communication, Home Energy Management, and eMobility

TL;DR

This paper explores how electronic identity cards, specifically the German ePA, can be integrated into VoIP, home energy management, and eMobility to enhance secure communication through reliable user identification and authentication.

Contribution

It demonstrates practical integration of electronic identity cards into three domains, enabling trusted identities for secure communication and device authentication.

Findings

Successful integration of ePA in VoIP, energy management, and eMobility

Enhanced security through trusted identity verification

Potential for widespread adoption of identity cards in new domains

Abstract

Using communication services is a common part of everyday life in a personal or business context. Communication services include Internet services like voice services, chat service, and web 2.0 technologies (wikis, blogs, etc), but other usage areas like home energy management and eMobility are will be increasingly tackled. Such communication services typically authenticate participants. For this identities of some kind are used to identify the communication peer to the user of a service or to the service itself. Calling line identification used in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) used for Voice over IP (VoIP) is just one example. Authentication and identification of eCar users for accounting during charging of the eCar is another example. Also, further mechanisms rely on identities, e.g., whitelists defining allowed communication peers. Trusted identities prevent identity spoofing, hence are a basic building block for the protection of communication. However, providing trusted identities in a practical way is still a difficult problem and too often application specific identities are used, making identity handling a hassle. Nowadays, many countries introduced electronic identity cards, e.g., the German "Elektronischer Personalausweis" (ePA). As many German citizens will possess an ePA soon, it can be used as security token to provide trusted identities. Especially new usage areas (like eMobility) should from the start be based on the ubiquitous availability of trusted identities. This paper describes how identity cards can be integrated within three domains: home energy management, vehicle-2-grid communication, and SIP-based voice over IP telephony. In all three domains, identity cards are used to reliably identify users and authenticate participants. As an example for an electronic identity card, this paper focuses on the German ePA.