Estonian identity card

The Estonian identity card (Estonian: ID-kaart) is a mandatory identity document for citizens of Estonia. In addition to regular identification of a person, an ID-card can also be used for establishing one's identity in electronic environment and for giving one's digital signature. Within the European Union and EFTA (Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein) and other countries and territories (Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Monaco, Montenegro, Northern Cyprus, San Marino, Serbia, Vatican City), the Estonian ID Card can be used by the citizens of Estonia as a travel document.

The mandatory identity document of a citizen of the European Union is also an identity card, also known as an ID card. The Estonian ID Card can be used to cross the Estonian border, however Estonian authorities cannot guarantee that other EU member states will accept the card as a travel document.

In addition to regular identification of a person, an ID-card can also be used for establishing one's identity in electronic environment and for giving one's digital signature. With the Estonian ID-card the citizen will receive personal @eesti.ee e-mail address, which is used by the state to send important information. In order to use the @eesti.ee e-mail address, the citizen have to forward it to his personal e-mail address using the State Portal eesti.ee.

The Estonian ID cards are used in health care, electronic banking, signing contracts, public transit, encrypting email and voting. Estonia offers over 600 e-services to citizens and 2400 to business. The card's chip stores digitised data about the authorised user, most importantly: the user's full name, gender, national identification number, and cryptographic keys and public key certificates.

The card's chip stores a key pair, allowing users to cryptographically sign digital documents based on principles of public key cryptography using DigiDoc. While it is possible also to encrypt documents using the card-holder's public key, this is used only infrequently, as such documents would become unreadable if the card were lost or destroyed.

By 27 May 2014, 160,809,440 electronic signatures were given, thus averaging to 10 signatures per card user per year.

Under Estonian law, since 15 December 2000 the cryptographic signature is legally equivalent to a manual signature.

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Wikipedia