Towards Building E-Government on the Grid

This chapter introduces the goal of ShanghaiGrid and its sub-project E-government on the grid. It first presents the main achievements of the E-government in Shanghai, points out that one of problems of the E-government is how to integrate each government agency’s resources to form cross-agency services for citizens, and argues why grid technique is an ideal way to solve that problem: grid can enable municipal government to integrate its information resources dispersed in different organizations in secure way with open standards and strengthen collaboration and information sharing. Then it gives a conceptual framework of E-government on the grid. Based on the GT3 core services, some core middlewares are developed to support the E-government infrastructure, i.e. workflow, transaction. OGSA-DAI is used to integrate data from different government agencies. The real-name citizen mailbox along with the MyProxy is the basic authentication method used in E-government.

A Formalized Design Method for Building E-Government Architechtures

E-government has the main goal of simplifying governmental processes and the interaction between citizens and state organizations. It therefore has to solve the problem of efficient and secure electronic exchange and processing of governmental documents and data across administration domains and boundaries, even crossing country borders. This is a difficult task that imposes a strict set of requirements to the design and modelling of e-government systems and demands the application of standardized architectural frameworks. This paper demonstrates how the ISO/RM-ODP, in combination with the UML notation, supports the de-sign and development of an open distributed e-government system, by addressing these requirements. It further presents a high level case study of how RM-ODP has been applied in the case of the eMayor platform to build a system supporting cross-border transactions between small to medium sized European municipali-ties.

Privacy- Enhanced Identity Management for E-Services

This chapter introduces the concept of privacy-enhanced identity management for e-services supporting the users needs to protect their privacy and sensitive information. Business activities are increasingly based on the use of remote resources and e-services as well as on the interaction between different, remotely-located, parties. In this context, the electronic execution of private and/or sensitive transactions must fully preserve information privacy by managing in a trustworthy and responsible way all identity and profile information that is released to remote parties. In this chapter, we investigate the main problems concerning identity management for e-services and outline the features that the next-generation of identity management systems should provide for. State-of-the-art technology in the field of privacy-enhanced identity management systems is also compared with traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) solutions. The analysis of the benefits of these modern identity management systems is presented and discussed with references also to the results of some experiences in the area of e-government, whose objective is the development of public administration privacy-aware e-services.

Secure Online Metering for a Liberalized Energy Market

The liberalization of the energy market requires frequent online access to metering devices. That is not only necessary for exchanging meter data, but also for management reasons. The integration of strong security mechanisms is an essential requirement for the introduction of online meter device access. The project SELMA (Secure Electronic Exchange of Metering Data) supported the development of a concept, the implementation and a field trial test of prototypes of such metering devices. This paper focuses on the security aspects. It describes the security analysis, the required security services and the security concept. The security concept includes the security mechanisms and cryptographic techniques applied to the metering data as well as the security management.

Trust and Security in Ambient Intelligence

The Information Society is increasingly dependent on largely distributed systems and infrastructures for life-critical and business-critical functions. The complexity of systems in Information Society is rapidly growing because of a number of factors like their size, their unboundness and interdependency, the multiplicity of involved actors, the need to pursue more decentralised control and, last but not least, the growing sophistication in functionality. This trend together with the pervasive use both of open information infrastructures for communications as well as of freeware software and common application platforms expose our society to new cyber vulnerabilities and threats that deserve better understanding, assessment and control. Building trust is essential for the development of the Information Society, and the electronic commerce in particular. This paper outlines the main research directions that have been defined as the priority ones in which to engage the European research community in the thematic priority Information Society Technologies (IST) of the 6th Framework Programme. To this purpose, the paper consolidates the results and recommendations of a number of consultation Workshops that were organised by the Commission in the years 2000-2002.

Towards Secure E-Government

Secure eGovernment has emerged as a critical goal for public administrations across the world. While eGovernment services bring the promise of efficient on line services, closer to its intended beneficiaries, being citizens, organizations and other public administration units, new challenges pose potential threats. This book presents the views of academics and layman from EU, USA and China on pertinent eGovernment issues. The emphasis is on the evolution of web services and security technologies as a plausible technology upon which eGovernment services can be based. The chapters of this book represent concepts that have been presented in the framework of the eMayor project. This chapter addresses some of the basic concepts and objectives of this book and introduces the reader in the secure eGovernment web services.

A Protocol for Anonymous and Accurate E-Polling

E-polling systems are a fundamental component of any E-democracy system as they represent the most appropriate tool for fostering citizens participation to public debates. Contrarily to e-voting protocols, they are characterized by less stringent security requirements and they can also tolerate errors affecting a small percentage of votes, without compromising of the final result. Thus, their realization can be effectively pursued supporting the diffusion of e-democracy. In this paper we propose a simple protocol for an accurate and anonymous e-polling system. Such a protocol satisfies, among the others, the following properties: a vote cannot be altered, duplicated, or removed without being detected, votes remain anonymous. Moreover voters will be able to measure the level of trust of the process by verifying that their own votes have been correctly counted.

Certificate Management Interoperability for E-Government Applications

Secure eGovernment aims at supporting public administration in delivering enhanced public services. In eGovernment electronic signatures and certification services are used to invoke trust and security in services and applications. Certification services, however, are often on offer in an apparent geographical or contextual isolation threatening to create new fault lines across eGovernment services that rely on them. As public administration often operates at multiple levels and in a compartmental manner, the risk is that limitations in the interoperability of certification services might hamper trust and security in the whole value chain of eGovernment. Drawing from the case of small public administrations this paper proposes a certification service architecture and approach to support interoperability in secure eGovernment services.

Biometric Authentication in Broadland Networks for Location-Based Services

Broadband communication networks have begun to spread rapidly over fixed networks, with wireless networks following at close distance. The excess capacity allows the offering of broadband services at competitive rates. Location based services (LBS) over wireless broadband networks are becoming mainstream in an emerging ambient intelligence society. For LBS over broadband and, in particular, pier-to-pier networks, such as ad-hoc networks, unambiguous user authentication is of paramount importance to user trust and safety, thus ultimately to the success of such service. Biometric authentication is an approach to providing irrefutable identity verification of a user, thus providing the highest level of security. This chapter addresses some of the issues associated with the use of biometric ID for user and apparatus authentication over broadband wireless networks (e.g. GPRS, UMTS, WiFi, LANs) and narrow band local networks (e.g. BlueTooth, Zigbee, PANs, BANs).

Building Innovative, Secure, and Interoperable E-Government Services

Research into initiatives worldwide shows that although some of the legal and organizational barriers for the adoption of new technologies in e-government have been lifted, there are still not many implementations of actual e-government services that have been designed based on a common and systematic approach. The most prevailing requirements for e-government services, interoperability and security, pose major challenges to e-government architects and it is now being slowly understood that Web Services in combination with Public Key Infrastructures may provide the necessary solutions. In this context, this paper presents three innovative e-government services based on these technologies, fo-cusing on their security and interoperability aspects. The goal of the paper is to demonstrate the services’ specifications and use cases so that they may act as ex-amples for further research and development.