Towards a Framework for Supporting Unconditionally Secure Authentication Services within E-Government

Abstract

It has been noticed by many researchers that the speed of ICT advancement in developing, deploying, and using e-government infrastructures is much faster than the development and deployment of security services. Therefore, government organizations are still suffering from the existence and emerging of security risks. One important category of cryptographic primitives that needs to be considered in this respect is the unconditionally secure message authentication codes (or A-codes). These A-codes are cryptographically approached based on information theory. They offer unconditional security, i.e., security independent of the computing power of an adversary. For many years, it was widely thought that A-codes were impractical for real applications. However, in recent years, many A-codes have been developed which are extremely efficient in terms of computations and key requirements. The aim of this work is to show the importance and validation of including unconditionally secure authentication services within e-government infrastructures. We believe that all main e-government services can get benefit from that in a way or another. This includes Government to Citizen (G2C), Government to Business (G2B), Government to Government (G2G), and Government to Constituents (E-Democracy) services. The work highlights the basic requirements for a general framework that facilitates the inclusion of such authentication services within the security infrastructure of e-government.