European Journal of ePractice

This case study focuses on how the Italian city of Grosseto managed to add highly secure eID-based access control to its ICT existing infrastructure applying a rigorous open source strategy. Developed to solve an interoperability problem, our eID access control system, called Open Portal Guard, has already been used with several foreign eIDs and we have started to seek to replicate our experience in other sites. We believe that the reuse of its open source code by other administrations and private sector service providers may jump-start many into the world of high-security identity management. This is even truer considering that to date a majority of European Member States are either implementing their eIDs strategies or plan to do so in short, and that the software we have developed is freely available from IDABC's OSOR repository.

In addition to promoting the use of our eID access control system, this case study also aims at encouraging the use of the open source approach in general. We hope this article illustrates the high potential for efficiency that comes through working with the community and collaborative development.