Less Digital Certification and More Electronic Identity: ICPEdu and CAFe in an Inclusive Digital Signer

Abstract

ICPEdu has issued 186 thousand certificates since 2020, of which around 42 thousand are still active, while CAFe gathers a million users. The talk starts from that gap to argue that users do not want to hold a digital certificate, they want to sign a document. The proposal is an inclusive PDF signer that requires no knowledge of digital certification and imposes no unnecessary interactions, relying instead on the identity the person already has in the academic federation. The architecture combines the identity providers of CAFe with the ICPEdu certification authority and a signing service, in a solution with a filed patent.