eIDAS Trust Services: 6 months on after the switch-over

An eIDAS Trust Services Workshop was held in Brussels, Belgium, on 19 December 2016, to present the state of play six months after the entry into force of the new rules for trust services under the eIDAS Regulation.

How well have Member States managed to comply with the new rules? Are there obstacles that still need to be overcome? What about trust service providers? Are they on the right path to seize the opportunities brought by the new framework? By providing a platform for sharing experience, best practices, business cases and success stories, the workshop was an opportunity to take stock of the changes introduced by eIDAS in the EU trust services landscape and to discuss how best to leverage the opportunities offered by the eIDAS Regulation.

On 1 July 2016, Chapter III of Regulation (EU) 910/2014, which lays down the rules on Trust Services, i.e. electronic signatures, electronic seals, electronic time stamps, electronic registered delivery services and website authentication, was applied directly in all 28 Member States. This represents a big step forward in building a Digital Single Market and will result in important changes both for public administrations and the providers of these services.

From the 1999 Directive on electronic signatures, we now have a directly applicable legal text going beyond electronic signatures and including a set of trust services which are important for secure and convenient electronic transactions across the EU.

This means new rules for public administrations but also for the providers of electronic trust services, which can be either qualified or non-qualified.

Trust service providers can decide whether to become qualified. If they do, there is an initiation process involving different actors, as a result of which qualified trust service providers and the qualified trust services provided by them are included in the Trusted Lists – which now have a constitutive effect (unlike before 1^st July, when they were only an information tool).

The objective of the one-day workshop was to present the state of play six months after the entry into force of these new rules.

The morning session of the workshop was devoted to share experiences, best practices and success stories through presentations and real use cases. In the afternoon, participants were split into break-out sessions to discuss real challenges and address concrete questions related to the eIDAS requirements.

The seminar was organised for representatives of the Member States, Supervisory Bodies, Conformity Assessment Bodies (CABs), National Accreditation Bodies (NABs), Certification Bodies (under Art. 30 of eIDAS Regulation), Trust Service Providers, ENISA and Standardisation Bodies - ETSI (CEN) representatives.