Building governments in e-government: settlement of trusted e-oligarchy

Abstract

More and more governments tend also to offer their services for mobile users. For many of their e-transactions that involve one or more pervasive computing entities, the role of a central trusted authority (TA) for assuring the binding between the identities and the used asymmetric keys is crucial. Usually governments take care of such a trusted third party. However, when this TA becomes unreachable, governments cannot instantly set up another TA and recovering the original TA takes too much valuable time. The reliance on those TA's without another alternative trust system can therefore jeopardize the transactions. In this paper a mechanism is proposed in which new TA's can be (re)elected autonomously and securely by a group of computing entities from their midst when the original TA becomes unreachable. Those new TA's rule then as an oligarchy over the other computing entities.