An Open Interface Enabling Secure e-Government (abstract)

When encouraging citizens to approach public administrations by electronic means in order to improve the public services and to avoid costly media transitions from paper-based applies to IT-supported back-office applications, authorities and implementers need to be in particular cautious in two aspects: On the one hand, security is an indispensable guiding principle for concerns of legal certainty, identification and authentication requirements, confidentiality and data protection aspects, and certainly security is needed to achieve broad user acceptance. Electronic signatures based on smartcards represent a state-of-the-art in supporting several of these security requirements. On the other hand, the concepts followed need to be technology-neutral to a large extent to both remain open for future or emerging technologies that may mature to meet these security requirements as well and to avoid discrimination against particular solutions. Otherwise inclusion of upcoming solutions may well turn out a costly experience.

In this paper the approaches followed with the Austrian citizen card are discussed - an ambitious project that aims at deploying e-Government on the large scale. By means of an open interface the authorities specify the requirements arising out of the applications in the administrative bodies. This allows the authorities to launch the development of applications based on well-defined interfaces, but not mandating a certain technological instantiation such as a social security card, public identity cards, or private-sector-borne signature cards such as banking cards. By taking up and implementing the interface specification an open market is stimulated that paves the way to a public-private partnerships. The paper gives the rationale of choosing the open interface approach and discusses its actual implementation - the so-called security layer - in detail.

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