Multi-Level Trust in E-Government Certi cation Practice

Trust management has been addressed recently to provide networked systems with the appropriate mechanisms to perform any conformance checking with respect to a security policy in e-business and e-government. Trust management is an important issue for the deployment and success of e-government. Besides, public-key infrastructures manage trust in data exchanges through email, over the web and using other electronic means. The principal elements used for maintaining that trust are the contents of the certificates and the security safeguards established in the environments where various parties are involved. These two elements are derived from the business requirements, according to the stipulations of the certificate policy and the applicable regulation. We show in this paper the need to introduce the paradigm of multi-level trust in e-government systems, and propose a solution that provides X.509 standards with the modifications to allow multi-level trust certificate management, publication, and efficient