News · 6 October 2026
Sole Control for Machines accepted for the NGISE 2026 proceedings
“Sole Control for Machines: An eIDAS-2.0 Remote-QSCD Census and Trust Primitive for Accountable Agentic Information Systems” was accepted on 6 October 2026 for publication in the Springer CCIS (Communications in Computer and Information Science) proceedings of NGISE 2026, the 2nd International Conference on Next Generation Information Systems Engineering. Anton Sokolov is the lead author and will present the paper; the work is co-authored with a colleague at Tallinn University of Technology, whose name appears in the proceedings.
The question is old and the subject is new. Under eIDAS, a qualified electronic signature must be created under the signatory's sole control. Remote signing moved the private key into a provider's hardware security module and kept sole control by certifying the device and the management around it. The paper asks what happens when the signatory is a machine: an AI agent acting under a mandate rather than a person pressing a button.
It answers in two parts. The first is a census of the EU trusted lists: which qualified providers offer remote qualified signature-creation devices (QSCDs), under which certified management profiles, and how that picture looked on the census date. The second is a trust primitive, an accountable agent authorisation model, that lets the same certified infrastructure carry a machine's actions without inventing a new certification: the architecture and its assurance are reused, the legal effect is not claimed.
The data and the reference implementation are public: 10.5281/zenodo.23321086 (version 1.1, 12 October 2026), including the census files, the raw trusted-list documents on which they rest, and the code that reproduces every figure in the chapter.
This is an acceptance, not yet a publication. The camera-ready chapter is due in November; the proceedings record will be linked here when Springer publishes it.