Herbert Leitold

STORK: Architecture, Implementation and Pilots

Who one is on the Internet turns out essential once sensitive information is exchanged or transactions of value are carried out. Electronic identification and identity management provide the solutions. Governments are important players in the area, having a tradition of providing qualified means of identification of their citizens. However, migration to electronic identities often developed as national islands that are based on one country&3x2019;s domestic legal, administrative and socio-cultural tradition. Once the citizens are crossing borders electronically, these islands need to get connected and interoperability becomes an issue.

Technology-Enabled Innovation for Democracy, Government and Governance

This paper analyses the legal basis and technical possibilities for citizen participation by electronic means on the European Union level; in particular, the various forms of dialogue introduced by Art 11 TEU as well as Art 20 TFEU are analysed. [1a, 1b]

E-voting: a scalable approach using XML and hardware security modules

E-voting increasingly gains interest in e-democracy and e-government movements. Not only the security and the availability of electronic election systems are of paramount importance, but also the scalability is of major interest. Especially the fact that in political elections the system has to scale nation-wide, thus having several millions of users, is to be considered. In this paper we state the difficulties and the requirements for a practical implementation of an e-voting system. Both security aspects and scalability issues are addressed. Therefore, the paper introduces a novel approach of building an e-voting system: a system is proposed that addresses one of the main problems in e-voting systems - preserving the voters decision an inviolable secret even though strong authentication of the voter is needed y introducing a specific hardware security module into the counting process. The proposed system scales well to large populations. XML is used as a basic technology, which also fits the ongoing e-voting standardization initiatives such as the election markup language (EML). The paper outlines how this approach fits ongoing international standardization initiatives, such as the upcoming Council of Europe recommendations on e-enabled elections.

Media-Break Resistant eSignatures in eGovernment: An Austrian Experience

Governments and public administrations produce documents – laws, orders, permits, notifications, etc. With the transition from traditional paper-based administration to eGovernment that we have seen in the last decade, authentic electronic documents gain importance. Electronic signatures promise to be a tool of choice. However, given the choice of access channels – electronic or conventional – public administrations offer, eDocuments will have to co-exist with traditional paper documents for several years, if not for decades. In this paper we discuss the Austrian practical experience gained with eSignatures and eDocuments in eGovernment.

A 155 Mbps Triple-DES Network Encryptor

The presented Triple-DES encryptor is a single-chip solution to encrypt network communication. It is optimized for throughput and fast switching between virtual connections like found in ATM networks. A broad range of optimization techniques were applied to reach encryption rates above 155 Mbps even for Triple-DES encryption in outer CBC mode. A high-speed logic style and full-custom design methodology made first-time working silicon on a standard 0.6 µm CMOS process possible. Correct functionality of the prototype was verified up to a clock rate of 275 MHz.

Securing multimedia services over satellite ATM networks

In recent years there has been increasing interest in interconnecting satellite and ATM networks, because both share common characteristics of the ability to provide bandwidth-on-demand and flexibility of integrating voice, video and data services. There are several new satellite constellation proposals that support multimedia service and transport ATM traffic. For a successful implementation of such systems it is essential to address the security requirements of users, satellite ATM network operators and multimedia service providers. In order to minimize delay and the cost of implementing security systems for satellite ATM networks, the network operator role (in security services) can be limited to the mutual authentication with satellite users during call set-up periods. In this paper a mutual authentication protocol between the user and the satellite network is presented using digital signature and public key systems. Also, another mutual authentication protocol between the user and the service provider is presented to provide end-to-end authentication and negotiation of security options such as selecting a secret key system and the key length. Finally, a detailed hardware implementation of ATM cell payload encryption is presented using the DES/TripleDES secret key system.

Advancing Democracy, Government and Governance

Knowledge Management in Government is high on the agenda and new developments give strong impulses. The contribution portrays chances and challenges in conjunction with these trends and discusses the following subjects: Knowledge Transfer, Best Practice Case Collections, Open Government Data, Social Media, Mobile Government, and Semantic Technologies.

Challenges of eID Interoperability: The STORK Project

Secure means of identification and authentication is key to many services such as in e-government or e-commerce. Several countries have issued national electronic identity (eID) infrastructure to support such services. These initiatives however have often emerged as national islands; using eID cross-border has not been on the agenda in most cases. This creates electronic barriers. The Large Scale Pilot STORK aims at taking down such barriers by developing an interoperability framework between national eID solutions. The framework is tested in six concrete cross-border applications. In this paper, an overview of the STORK architecture and the pilot applications is given.

STORK e-privacy and security

The paper focuses on the legal, data security and privacy issues of the STORK (Secure idenTity acrOss boRders linKed) infrastructure and aims (a) to summarize the main findings and (b) to identify key points that the STORK consortium and stakeholders need to resolve in order to make the STORK security and privacy framework more robust, with the ambition to contribute to more strategic and far-reaching road-mapping and decision making in Europe in the field of electronic identification and authentication. Our findings are based on the roundtable discussion with experts and other stakeholders on the privacy and security legal challenges associated to cross-border use of national authentication solutions within STORK pilot projects.

A study of TCP/IP throughout performance in heterogeneous ATM local area networks

This paper investigates the maximum throughput performance of TCP/IP over ATM-based local area networks. The testbeds for the measurements use second- generation ATM switches to interconnect various personal computers and workstations in a heterogeneous environment. The effects of parameters such as socket buffer size and message size on TCP/IP performance over ATM adaptation layer 5 are studied. The results are compared with the calculated theoretically available maximum bandwidth offered by ATM, and an estimation of the limits caused by the processing power of the computers involved. Explanations for the observed behaviour are given.