Estonian e-residency

Estonia has one of the most advanced electronic governments. If not the most advanced. Its citizens can perform legal acts remotely via the Internet: to vote, to register a company, to declare taxes, to sign a contract.

A citizen has cryptographic keys, which are verified by the Estonian state. Estonian governmental bodies have to accept citizens’ requests in face-to-face or hard-copy ways and in the form of digitally signed documents.

As digitally signed documents have legal value, any two parties with cryptographic keys issued by the Estonian government could close a contract without face-to-face meetings and hard-copy documents.

Estonians decided to move on and started to issue such digital identities to anyone who wanted. Of course, there is no connection with Estonian citizenship. Estonia only confirms that these cryptographic keys were issued to this person. It means a document, signed by the keys, was signed by the person.

That is why, if you want to run a business at a more global level, you can apply for an Estonian e-residency. It will allow you to register a company in Estonia remotely, open a bank account (currently, this action requires one physical visit to the bank), sign contracts, pay taxes and get profit.

Installation of required software in Fedora Linux

ID.ee, the developer of E-residency software, provides packages only for Ubuntu Linux. But Fedora repositories already contain the required software.

So we need to install the following components:

• system service PCSC to allow Linux to communicate with smart-card reader
• driver to allow PCSC to communicate with your specific smart-card reader
• plugins for web-browser to provide authentification and other operations with smart-card
• utility to manage PIN/PUN codes and certificates of smart-card.

Everything except the driver could be installed with the following command:

	sudo dnf install pcsc-lite firefox-esteid-plugin \
	firefox-esteidpkcs11loader qesteidutil qdigidoc

As for the driver, along with the smart card, I got a card reader ACR38. Drivers for the reader can be downloaded from the official page. You need a PC/SC Driver Package for Linux. It is a 2 MB zipped archive named like ACS-Unified-PKG-Lnx-112-P.zip.

	unzip -j ACS-Unified-PKG-Lnx-112-P.zip *fc23.i686.rpm
	sudo dnf install pcsc-lite-acsccid-1.1.2-1.fc23.i686.rpm

Check the version of the file in these commands.

Next, you need to start the PCSC system service. If you want the service to be automatically started at boot time, use the following command:

sudo systemctl enable pcscd

The service will be started the next time you boot your Fedora. To start the service immediately, use the start option:

sudo systemctl start pcscd

Using the software

Now you can work with your Estonian e-identity card in the Mozilla Firefox web browser. The link to the ID-card utility is located Accessories menu. Also, you can start it with the command qesteidutil.

Look for further information on the official website.

The blinking of the card reader led

I found a problem with the sequence of launching Firefox and inserting of ACR38 card reader. If Firefox is already running and I insert the card with the card reader, the led blinks chaotically, and authorization does not work.

To avoid this, you should first insert a card reader with an ID card. Then launch or restart Firefox. In this case, the led will be on, and authorization will work.

The original version was posted on Rstat.Consulting.