Access policies to government services can not be managed easily. According to
a specific policy, each entity may be granted a set of permissions to perform specific
actions on certain targets. The architecture, services, and roles performed by the govern-
ment agencies are very divergent in their nature and the way they should be protected.
For example, the protection provided for a given transaction may vary based on the im-
portance of the transaction itself, the data it includes (e.g., amount of money, priority,
privacy, etc.), and the site it accesses. Consequently, many levels of trust need to be
made available in an e-government environment. However, once we get into details, it
becomes increasingly evident that the trust model conforming X.509 is not particularly
appropriate for e-government [3,4]. One major shortcoming of the X.509 certificates is
that they are not flexible and offer only one level of trust. Therefore, it can not fulfill the
requirements of e-government needs.
This paper proposes a multi-trust model integrating the X.509 certificate model in an
e-government environment. It provides the modifications needed by relevant functions,
and organizes an appropriate LDAP hierarchy for the publication of multi-trust certifi-
cates. Our contribution is three-fold. First, it keeps the main features of the X.509 (e.g.,
use of global names, certificates and revocation procedure). Second, it organizes con-
ceptually various layers where certificates offering the same level of trust are located,
while allowing certificates to handle more than one trust level. Finally, it describes
and justifies the modifications to the main functions of certificate management. The re-
maining part of this paper is organized as follows. In the second section, we address
the different requirements that must be fulfilled by a PKI to respond to the different
needs of the e-government and cope with the provision of various levels of trust. The
third section presents the modifications that should be introduced to a PKI to add the
multi-trust model. In the fourth section, a strategy of analysis is presented to ensure an
adequate choice of a PKI architecture in an e-government environment with multi-trust
levels, and estimate the cost of adding new features. The last section presents a case
study of a model allowing a reduced set of trust levels.
2 Requirements for e-government PKI
In an e-government environment, many issues need to be addressed when establishing
a PKI [1]. These issues include the following tasks:
* Provide public certification services (including certificate public archives for verifica-
tion) and customized registration authorities (RAs).
* Provide technical specifications for government PKI standard documents (including
documents such as Certification Policy and Certificate practice Statements).
* Issue and manage certificate services (publishing, revocation, renewal, time stamping,
and validating certificates).
* Provide application programming interface (API) for data encryption, digital signa-
ture, and digital envelope and many other on-line services.
* Address PKI Interoperability and trust paths including interconnection issues between
Certification Authorities (CA), Cross certification policy, Cross-border interoperability
with other governments (eg. Bridge CA, Strict hierarchy).
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