Opening up the Public Sector through Collaborative Governance
S.A.F.E. – Secure Access to Federated eJustice/eGovernment Submitted by Ministry of Justice of the State of Baden-Württemberg and Ministry of Justice of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia
Contact details of lead applicant
Case description
Organisation Address Country Web address
‘S.A.F.E.’ (Secure Access to Federated eJustice/eGovernment) lays down a technical framework for interoperable and safe usage of digital identities across administrative borders (Trust-Domains) and is set up from the Web Service Protocol Stack (WS-*) of OASIS and W3C. The selected standards are profiled for the sake of interoperability.
Ministry of Justice of the State of Baden-Württemberg Schillerplatz 4, 70173 Stuttgart Germany www.justiz.de
Contact Person Jürgen Ehrmann Function Project Leader Email ehrmann@jum.bwl.de Administrative level of lead applicant National Size of organisation >100
EPSA2011096
Number of people involved in the project >15 Type of sector Justice, police, human rights and security Key words of project Federal identity management, secure access
The ‘S.A.F.E.’ concept aims at the secure registration, authentication and authorisation, as well as the secure storage of participants’ communication. Since these aims are of common interest for most eGovernment services, also beyond communication and beyond eJustice, ‘S.A.F.E.’ has been developed in two stages: • At the first stage a common standard for user management and registration for general eGovernment services has been adopted. A Web Service based Identity Management infrastructure has been set up which can be used as a common standard for securing access to eGovernment services. The standard is open and expandable to allow interoperability between different eGovernment services and to provide Single-Sign-On (SSO) solutions for accessing different services with the same digital identity. • At the second stage, this general concept has been specialised further for its use in the concrete eJustice communication scenario. Whilst preserving the general concept, further specialisations and extensions are made to meet the demands of the concrete eJustice application. The base concept can be customised by other eGovernment applications. This generates an expanding pool of interoperable eGovernment services with a common registration and authentication interface. ‘S.A.F.E.’ provides an open and standardised framework to all public and legal German administrations. Due to its open format and serviceoriented architecture it can be easily extended and adapted to other applications and is highly scalable to large scenarios. The concept of trusted domains offers easy adaptation to specific laws and rules within each trusted domain in terms of rights management and avoids repeated registration and proof of authentication. The consequent use of standards and the service oriented architecture of ‘S.A.F.E.’ provide an easy to adapt technology and thus offer its use to all public and private applications within eGovernment and eJustice.
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