With more than 160 million inhabitants, Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. Currently, an ambitious electronic identity card project is underway and thus represents a truly mammoth initiative. For the Nigerian government only the best is good enough. The multipurpose identity document will eventually support more than a dozen different applications, ranging from two-factor online authentication to health insurance and many more. Perhaps most significantly, the eID card will bring electronic payments to the significant amount of unbanked citizens who currently have only fringe access to the financial system. By combining advanced security mechanisms like PKI, biometrics, and EMV payment, the Nigerian eID card represents an innovative next generation of identity documents. This eID project outweighs the German electronic identity card (nPA) in both the size of the project and the variety of applications.

In order to secure both the eID card and the backend infrastructure, the Nigerian eID leverages one of the largest and most complex Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) in the world. It includes at least eight certification authorities, and about a dozen different certificate types, and will eventually host over 100 million Nigerian citizens and legal residents over the age of 16.

This PKI represents the backbone and the security base of the Nigerian eID system. Not only does it provide digital certificates for the card holders to use for digital signature and authentication, but also it ensures that only authorised devices have access to the eID chip for reading personal data. By employing advanced authentication mechanisms, fine grained permissions allow for authorised systems to read and even update personal eID chip data at specified agencies. 

Operating such an advanced PKI depends on one of the most powerful PKI solutions available. The Nigerian Identity Management Commission has selected the product Camelot provided by German-based vendor Cryptovision.  The continued deployment and growth of the PKI proceeds at full speed and according to the company the Cryptovision specialists are always available to support the certificate provisioning work and support the ongoing eID deployment process.

Cryptovision CEO Markus Hoffmeister is pleased: "We are proud that our PKI software Camelot is used in one of the most exciting e-ID projects of our days.”