White Paper∗ Protecting e-Government Against Attacks

E-Government services operate, by definition, across the Internet: citizens use their own desktops or mobile devices to access, via the Internet, government services hosted on servers physically located in some government agency, or even on a private or public cloud. Attacks on e-government can such be broadly divided into three categories: server-side attacks (i.e. on the government servers), client-side attacks (i.e. on the citizen’s computing/access device) and network attacks (i.e. on the Internet connection, either by interfering with existing connections/sessions or by an attacker pretending to the server to be a valid client or to the client to be a valid server). This analysis explicitly ignores network attacks, as these are outside our expertise.