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A Secure and Flexible Server-Based Mobile eID and e-Signature Solution

Authors:
Christof Rath
Simon Roth
Manuel Schallar
Thomas Zefferer

Keywords: eGovernment; eID; electronic identity; electronic signature; identity management; mobile security

Abstract:
In our digital society, e-government, e-commerce, and e-business are increasingly gaining importance. Many services of these domains rely on reliable user authentication and electronic signatures. For many years, smart cards have been the technology of choice to implement eID and e-signature solutions. Recently, mobile eID and e-signature solutions have emerged as an attractive alternative, as they provide better usability compared to smart card based approaches while maintaining the same level of security. Unfortunately, most current mobile eID and e-signature solutions are tailored to the needs of specific application scenarios and hence cannot easily be applied to and used for other use cases. This prevents a broad use of mobile eID and e-signature solutions and leads to a situation, in which many services still rely on smart card based approaches with poor usability or even insecure password-based solutions for user authentication. To overcome this issue, we propose an improved mobile eID and e-signature solution. In contrast to existing comparable solutions, the proposed solution has been designed such that compatibility with arbitrary use cases is guaranteed. This way, its integration into arbitrary services and applications is facilitated. The feasibility and applicability of the proposed solution has been successfully evaluated by means of a concrete implementation. This implementation demonstrates that the proposed solution provides a secure and usable alternative to existing eID and e-signature solutions and has the potential to improve the security of various e-government services and applications from private-sector domains.

Pages: 7 to 12

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: March 23, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3956

ISBN: 978-1-61208-324-7

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from March 23, 2014 to March 27, 2014