The Estonian Mobile-ID Implementation on the SIM Card
Date
2022
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
Mobile-ID is an eID solution that can be used for authentication and digital
signing. It has been transaction for more than a decade, and it is popular
in Estonia. As of May 2022, more than 251 000 Mobile-IDs are in use,
and, on average, 10 million operations are completed each month [1]. The
solution relies on a special Mobile-ID functionality built into a phone SIM
card. There is publicly available documentation about Mobile-ID [2], but it
mainly describes the communication between the e-services implementing
Mobile-ID support and the Mobile-ID backend. Not much information
is publicly available on how Mobile-ID functionality is implemented on
the SIM card, how it interacts with the phone and how it communicates
with the Mobile-ID backend. In this work, interactions between the SIM
card and the phone are documented. Additionally, the communication
between the SIM card and the Mobile-ID backend is described, as well as
how Mobile-ID service SMS are used to perform Mobile-ID transaction.
Description
Keywords
Mobile-ID, SMS, SIM card, SIM Application Toolkit, Over-the-Air (OTA)