Integrated Security System for E-government Based on Saml Standard

This paper describes an integrated security system for electronic-government services. Many governments are transforming manual government services to electronic government services. This transformation is in most cases done without involving users of the services. This makes users of these services have little trust in the e-government. Security is in most cases not addressed from the early stages of e-government development. Some governments depend on security solutions from private vendors and these governments do not have full control of security. E-government services have different levels of classification and so they require different types of authentication and authorization methods. Most e-government systems today use one form of authentication in all types of services without considering the different sensitivity levels. All countries have different levels of e-literacy and users with low levels of e-literacy do not understand some of today's e-government security systems. This security system provides multiple authentication methods. Some e-government services require simple authentication while other highly classified transactions demand strong authentication. This security system provides multiple authorization schemes, information integrity schemes and digital signature schemes. These schemes can be configured to accommodate different e-literacy levels. The system integrates a registration system, a certification system, an authorization system, and a smart card system. It bases on the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standard, which is an XML-based framework for exchanging security information. The system can be integrated in existing e-government systems and can be built-in in new e-government systems. Information of different levels of classification can be stored in same websites and can be accessed through multiple authentication and authorization methods. This system enables the society to perform secure e-government transactions and accommodates different e-literacy levels.