Herbert Leitold
Center for Secure Information Technology - Austria, A-SIT
Austria

Arno Hollosi and Reinhard Posch
Federal Chief Information Office
Austria

In this paper the security architecture followed with the Austrian citizen card is presented. This dedicated concept where smart-cards are going to be rolled out to every Austrian citizen by 2003 will establish the citizen’s security infrastructure to utilize emerging e-Government applications. We briefly present the legal provisions that enable e-Government. We than reflect on requirements to be fulfilled to achieve a lasting security architecture that provides swift deployment of applications, but provides the flexibility do not discriminate against service providers and technologies that will emerge in future. The concept called “security layer” is discussed as the core part of the security architecture, which basically is an open interface that hides the security-relevant functionality of the citizen card on a high abstraction level. A few e-Government applications that are being launched in the short-term are sketched to give a touch of the variety of requirements covered in the architecture.

Keywords: e-Government, electronic signatures

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