Today the European Public Sector Players lack the necessary infrastructure and technology to allow them to integrate their computing clouds. Furthermore, legislative barriers often make it difficult to use available commercial technological solutions. The SUNFISH project aims to provide a specific and new solution to face these issues. SUNFISH will enable the secure federation of private clouds based on the Public Sector needs: federated private clouds belonging to different Public Sector Entities will be able to share data and services transparently, while maintaining required security levels. The SUNFISH project will develop and integrate software enabling secure cloud federation as required by European Public Sector bodies. The project will achieve this by meeting firstly the specific challenges faced by the Maltese and Italian Ministries of Finance, as well as by the UK Regional Cyber Crime Units, the three SUNFISH selected use cases. Solutions will be developed to be usable by other European Public Organisations, and potentially also by private sector players. SUNFISH will improve security in federated “cross-border” clouds, boosting the development of a cloud computing market in sectors where privacy and control of information propagation are essential (e.g., e-government, e-health etc.) while encouraging a better resource utilisation of Public Administration cloud infrastructure. The secure system for federated private clouds developed through the project will guarantee a high level of safety, a continuous monitoring of inter-cloud communications, and the ability to roll out services cheaply, in a fast, flexible and secure way even between different private clouds. The SUNFISH project aims to reduce the management cost of private clouds owned by Public Administrations, and - beyond pure costs savings – to accelerate the transition to 21st century interoperable and scalable public services, boosting enforcement of the European Digital Single Market.

Against the background of the regulation 2014/910/EU on electronic identification (eID) and trusted services for electronic transactions in the internal market (eIDAS), the FutureTrust project aims at supporting the practical implementation of the regulation in Europe and beyond. For this purpose the FutureTrust project will address the need for globally interoperable solutions through 1) basic research with respect to the foundations of trust and trustworthiness, with the aim of developing new, widely compatible trust models or improving existing models, 2) actively driving the standardisation process, and 3) providing Open Source software components and trustworthy services as a functional base for fast adoption of standards and solutions. FutureTrust will demonstrate positive business cases for the reliance on electronic signatures, sealing services, and long-term authenticity of data and documents, all with a focus on accountability, transparency and usability. For a subset of use cases, carefully selected for relevance and visibility, the FutureTrust consortium will devise real world pilot applications for the public and private sector with a focus on legally significant global electronic transactions in between EU member states and with non-EU countries. The FutureTrust project will in particular develop a comprehensive Open Source validation service as well as a scalable preservation service for electronic signatures and will provide components for the eID-based application for qualified certificates across borders, and for the trustworthy creation of remote signatures and seals in a mobile environment. Furthermore, the FutureTrust project will extend and generalize existing trust management concepts to build a “Global Trust List”, which allows to maintain trust anchors and metadata for trust services and eID related services around the globe.

The “Mobile Cross-Border Government Services for Europe” (mGov4EU) project will lift cross-border services supported by the Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR) and by the eIDAS Regulation to new levels by enabling them for a mobile-device use we nowadays naturally expect. This shall come with unprecedented user journeys by making extensive use of automatic attribute provision and SDGR’s once-only principle, complemented by mobile identification so that the so-far cumbersome filling of complex forms gets replaced by user-controlled and user-consented releasing of authoritative data. By taking advantage of security features of modern smartphones like hardware-backed secure elements together with integrated convenience elements like biometric sensors, mGov4EU will meet both the security needs and data-protection expectations one has into public services and the usability challenges that arise when accessing complex services using constrained mobile devices. mGov4EU will, therefore, research, design, implement, and evaluate an open ecosystem for secure mobile government services to be used across Europe and beyond. This is accomplished by combining and enhancing the existing eIDAS Layer and SDGR Layer with modules for mobile devices that are generic enough so that they can be re-used in the emerging and thus still heterogeneous European mobile-government landscape. Thus, mGov4EU will provide a trustworthy federation of collaborative platforms, which facilitates the co-delivery, reuse, and trustworthy provision of accessible and easy-to-use public services. mGov4EU will implement the once-only, digital-by-default and mobile-first principles in a user centric and user friendly manner in order to support and complement the practical implementation of the eIDAS and the Single Digital Gateway Regulations.