ACTIVITIES :: eTen :: Projects :: Projects of the Month :: CERTISERV

May 2006 Project of the Month: CERTISERV

CERTIfied communication for secure eGovernment SERVices in Europe

Issues being addressed

The CERTISERV project enables public authorities to interact with all their counterparts – citizens, business partners (companies) or other public authorities - electronically in a secure, trusted and seamless way. The system consists of a common middleware (“Governikus”) that connects the appli-cations – E-Government scenarios - of the communication partners and is responsible for central func-tionalities such as:

Encryption and Decryption
Validation of electronic signatures
Verification of certificates
Authentication
Time stamp service
Acknowledgement of message receipt

Objectives of the project

The main objectives of the project are to increase the number of public services which are online available and to improve the provision of the electronic handling of public services.

With the introduction of the CERTISERV services public administrations will be enabled to provide all kind of public services easily in an electronic and secure way. With CERTISERV services no institu-tional adaptations are necessary to open up a secure way of communication and all sorts of recipients and senders can participate. It is a basis infrastructure which permits interoperability because commu-nication with all sorts of PKI is possible. No new technology will be invented, only existing open stan-dard technologies are used and transformed to an operating system.

In three pilot cities – Bremen, Bologna and Sheffield – different e-Government services, considering the country specific framework, were set up and validated. The expansion of the CERTISERV services to other administrations than in the three pilot cities is achievable without any technical borders and it is the major goal of all CERTISERV activities.

The validated services have the potential to provide a comprehensive European-wide system architec-ture for secure communication and transaction with electronic signatures.

Services

The CERTISERV middleware realises the idea of secure, internet based and unstructured data ex-change between public administration and its customers (citizens and business organisations) or other administrations. The system consists of a common middleware connecting different service providers and being responsible for central functionalities (encryption and decryption, validation of electronic signatures, verification of certificates, authentication, time stamp service, acknowledgement of mes-sage receipt) and a client application (message handling, en-/decryption) implementing specifications for a secure transport layer. It constitutes a solution for unstructured communication via internet. Within the CERTISERV middleware system customers and public authorities can transfer secure, comprehensible and confidential messages via the internet from one to another.

The CERTISERV system is hardware and infrastructure independent, all services of the system are based on existing open standards. It is matured open standard technology which is put together to a system to accomplish the requirements of eGovernment in European Countries.

Achievements

The overall objectives of the project are to increase the number of public services which are online available and to improve the provision of the electronic handling of public services.

To fulfill these objectives the main activities are the successful deployment of the CERTISERV ser-vices in all three pilot sites. The following applications were set up and will be rolled out.

Bremen

Exchanging order to pay
Communication between Public Prosecutor Department and criminal courts
Communication between disabled people/their representatives and the pension office

Bologna

Supplier Portal
Citizens Messaging System

Sheffield

E-Consultation
Digital Signed E-Forms
Digital Signed E-Mails

Besides these applications the introduction of further attractive applications after the project is in the focus of the consortium activities. For the European wide deployment of the CERTISERV services a partnering program which exists already for Germany shall be released to achieve a resale oriented internationalization approach. First networking and partnering events took already place in Germany and UK. An updated project info site is available under www.certiserv.org

Expected benefits by the end of the project

The benefits of CERTISERV services are:

Seamless and secure eGovernment services for citizens and companies: faster access to ser-vices, less internal efforts, less fees.
Modernization and the significant increase of efficiency of public services
Scalable and easy extension to other administrations, institutions or companies: designed for open user groups
Support of different levels of security: adaptable to the security needs of the applications
Hardware and Platform independent
Application independent: different kind of messages are supported
Interoperability and only open XML-standards are used
Allows inclusion of different PKIs (ISIS-MTT)
Extensive security features on protocol level

The partners

Reference Data

http://www.certiserv.org
Contract Type: Market Validation
Start Date: March 2005
End Date: May 2006
Duration: 14 Months
Contact: sr@bos-bremen.de