A leading authentication solutions company, TrustBearer Labs, has announced support for the Belgium eID, the Belgian national identification card, with its TrustBearer OpenID service.

Making it possible for over 7 million Belgian citizens to use their eID cards to access any website that accepts OpenID, the Belgium eID smart card, with TrustBearer OpenID support, can now be paired with the OpenID web authentication standard. The card is used for identification and access to government services and is required to be carried by all citizens older than 15.

OpenID is an online authentication standard that allows a single ID to be used with any website that supports OpenID. Many OpenID critics and proponents agree that its business viability hinges upon addressing some security and privacy issues, while OpenID is gaining momentum with involvement from leading companies, such as IBM Orange, AOL, Yahoo and other industry leaders.

TrustBearer Labs launched, to address some of these issues, a public OpenID service, https://openid.trustbearer.com, which pairs an OpenID account with a user's smart card or other authentication device, which is used to securely authenticate the user. This gives the user full control of what information, if any, is transmitted to third parties during authentication.

To provide international electronic-ID-holders with a way to use their IDs for authentication over the web was one of TrustBearer Lab's primary goals for this service. The service initially allowed U.S. government employees to use federal-issued smart cards with an OpenID. TrustBearer Labs has announced, since then, support for the Finland National ID and several other smart cards and authentication devices. The TrustBearer OpenID service, with the Belgian ID support, reaches over 12 million users which already have an authorized identification card.