By the end of 2018 it will be possible to request an electronic identity card from all Italian Municipalities. It is time to say goodbye to its paper version, which has accompanied generations of citizens, and start using a plastic one of the size of a credit card. The picture will be black and white, laser-printed and will be equipped with a radio frequency (RF) microchip that stores the holder’s data.

In addition to identification purposes, the CIE - in fact - can be used to request the digital identity on the SPID system (Digital Public Identity System). The digital identity, used together with the CIE, guarantees access to the services provided by the PP.AA. At the moment the only operator that provides online recognition with CIE to get SPID is POSTE, but future developments are expected. To encourage the value-added services development, Diego Piacentini  and his team Digitale created the community “Developers Italia”. Within this community there is a section dedicated to the CIE project, containing the software libraries, published in open source logic, which facilitate the implementation of complex applications that use the CIE for their security and identification aspects. Poligrafico specialists, in collaboration with the Digital Team and the Ministry of the Interior, are the maintainers of this section.

Another ongoing development concerns the use of CIE for accessing mobile services: the idea is to create interfaces that not only read CIE data (as it is for IDEA application already available on Google Play), but that serve to directly access the services.

Among the various innovations introduced by the CIE, in addition to the replacement of the laser-based optical band with the radio-frequency chip, there is also the SSCE emission software, which has been replaced by the online CIE system which controls the characteristics of the picture and the acquired fingerprints.

In addition to serving as a travel document for the countries belonging to the U.E. and for those with whom the Italian state has signed specific agreements, the CIE also has other levels of use, for example: to carry out a strong authentication process on the web, using the digital authentication certificate and the related private key, after verification of the user PIN. The PIN is received by the citizen together with the CIE (a first half at the request, a second half together with the card).

The new Electronic Identity Card, therefore, is starting to be a real key to accessing many public services and an increasingly intelligent tool to gather the essential information of every citizen.