An Architecture for Secure Policy Enforcement in E-Government Services Deployment.

Citizens interact at regular intervals with municipalities or municipal organizations. Public administrations offer a variety of services like requests/processing of certificates and (local) tax payment. An effective and efficient service provision brings benefits to both municipalities and the involved citizens/customers of a particular service. Due to the fact that exchanged data in forms and documents may contain private or/and sensitive data, it is imperative to introduce security mechanisms that guarantee to citizens a trustworthy means of communication via a network that may be insecure, such as the Internet. Further, cross-border services involve different municipalities and other public authorities in the processes. The described work is derived from research for "eMayor", a project funded by the EU committee. eMayor addresses the specific audience of Small and Medium sized Governmental Organizations (SMGOs) across Europe. The project looks especially at transactions that are performed on a European level. This paper focuses on an architecture for secure policy enforcement within eGovernment platforms, such as the eMayor platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]