Security Challenges For Expanding E-governments’ Services

In the scope and vision of using and expanding the types of services e-government portals can offer to citizens, one of the major challenges and possible barriers is the security concern. Unlike typical websites that include largely data to browse and download, such portals are expected to have sensitive private personal data about country citizens. The threat of possible intrusion or identity theft is high and may cause serious consequences. This paper proposes a multilevel security layered architecture for e-government websites based on the data access privileges. The paper evaluates the current security status of selected e-government portals in Jordanian e-government suite of websites. The focus of the evaluation is on possible vulnerabilities in securities and possible candidate threats. The study focuses on showing the weaknesses and problems that face the expansions of egovernment services in Jordan to be fully active in the e-business to provide services to citizens throughout the Internet. The study makes some recommendations on how to approach such problems.