Security Challenges in Distributed Web Based Transactions: An Overview on the Italian Employment Information System

introduction Public administrations, during the last few years, activated modernizations in public service delivery. In particular, this arrangement relates to the service digitalization and automation, thanks to the massive inclusion of Information and communication technologies in public offices. This paved the way for internal and external organizational and technological changes, in that a new approach is required to leverage the new technologies. Moreover, the Internet technologies began to play an important role in public services delivery, and many transactions are Web-based nowadays. In this perspective, several governments in Europe (Liikanen, 2003), and others all over the world, started their own plans of e-government with the goal of increasing the amount and the quality of the service offered to their customers (citizens, enterprises, profit, and no-profit organizations) via the Internet. In such a streamline, one of the fields where e-government is more fertile regards public employment services: in fact, due to their social implications (e.g., sustainability, workforce mobility, workers' re-qualification paths, training for fresh graduates and students), they are becoming more and more important. Consequently, employment information systems 0 Security Challenges in Distributed Web Based Transactions deserve a special attention in public employment service provision. In Italy, the job workfair has been conceived as a distributed and cooperative network and is regulated by a law dated October 23, 2003. The job workfair plays an important role in the plan of e-government (CNIPA, 2002) that was launched in 2002. Table 1 sums up the objectives of the Italian plan of e-government. As a general trend, we observe that public administrations opted for the creation of local portals at the beginning of the project. Each portal was directly managed by the local public administration, and had no relationships with other local portals. In a second phase, each local Portal joined a federation created to establish relationships among the local portals. The federation was conceived as glue of the local nodes (more back-end oriented rather than front-end oriented) and not as a replacement of the local portals. As a result, all the local Information Systems are connected into a distributed and cooperative Information System (Coulouris, Dollimore & Kindberg, 1994). The local portals and the corresponding local information systems are very different from each other. They could not have been easily replaced by a single centralized version. The federative approach , although exploiting the local peculiarities, raises some issues concerning the management of global or …