Improving the Security Levels of E-government Processes within Public Administration through the Establishment of Improved Security Systems

Abstract

Processes that are related to the identification and the authentication of persons and other legal entities have been necessarily existing and functioning for a while in public administration and business. Information Society offers new e-services for citizens and businesses, which dramatically change the administration and results additional challenges, risks and opportunities. Citizen’s confidence and trust to services has to be improved, meanwhile several requirements, like data protection, privacy and legal requirements has to be satisfied. The usual business process of identification of the corresponding entity is generally based on some trivial control mechanism, typically password identification. In order to keep up the trust of the public in the public administration activities, the process for entity identification (both person and legal entity) should be amended taken in account the business and security consideration. Identity management solutions show intriguing variation of approaches in Europe, they are at a different maturity level of services. Our paper gives an overview about the most frequently cited identity management architectures (namely: Liberty Alliance Architecture, IDABC, Sibboleth, Government Gateway Model and Austrian Model) and presents an identity management framework (based on the PKI, but improved it), customized for the Hun-garian specialities, which offer possibilities to improve the related services quality. The goal of this paper is to show a solution for the improvement of the identity management solution for e-government processes through the development of security mechanisms making use of the readily avail-able technologies.