Electronic authentication for e-Government services - a survey

Electronic authentication (a.k.a e-Authentication) is the process of establishing confidence in a user's identity electronically presented to an information system. In today's world of exploding internet usage and adoption of eGovernance and e-Commerce initiatives in countries across the world, it is imperative that a user is identified with confidence. In the last 5 years or so, there have been many cases of fraud or misappropriation that could have been avoided had there been a proper e-Authentication system in place. In this paper we present a survey of different eAuthentication systems and standard guidelines being followed for Electronic Government in countries across the world. The aim of this paper is to do a comparative study of various national and international e-Authentication frameworks and to map them with the guidelines of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) [13] for eAuthentication. We explored USDA e-Authentication [12], National e-Authentication Framework of Australian Government [5], Qatar's e-Authentication Framework [10], Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Recommendation on Electronic Authentication [9], ePramaan eAuthentication framework of India [7] and Norwegian FANR [8]. Recently, there has been an increasing emphasis on additional functionalities such as Single-Sign-On (SSO), two-way authentication to guard against phishing attacks; and federated electronic authentication. In this paper we also present a case study of a framework that takes into account federated architecture for authentication as well as SSO for e-Government and public services. e-Pramaan can also be integrated with mobile based signature service.