The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is one of the global pioneers in employing identity and trust as two principal components in enabling secure digital transactions.
"These two components impact decisively in all service providing systems, especially when these systems deal with sensitive data," argued Dr. Ali Mohamed Al Khouri, Director General of the Emirates Identity Authority, in a research paper published in the European Scientific Journal, a premier journal that has carried so far peer-reviewed academic papers by academics from more than 120 countries from around the world.
The paper, written by Dr. Al Khouri in scholarly collaboration with Muhammad Farmer, Professor, British Institute of Technology & E-commerce, London, UK, and Jameel Qadri, Research Fellow, British Institute of Technology & E-commerce, London, UK, and titled "A Government Framework to Address Identity, Trust and Security in EGovernment: The Case of UAE Identity Management Infrastructure," called upon governments to develop integrated electronic and information infrastructure with a view to make the e-transition more effective, more reliable and secure and to link it to advanced and smart systems of identity management.
"The e-government initiatives in the U.A.E. are completely in alignment with the general principles of the U.A.E. Government‘s strategic cycles for the period up to 2021. Among other things, the strategies efforts for integrated policies, effective coordination and cooperation among federal entities, the delivery of high-quality, customer-centric and integrated government services, the promotion of efficient resource management and the enhancement of transparent and accountable governance mechanisms. A trusted government identity management infrastructure is one of the principal building block imperatives that the U.A.E. government has initiated to enable e-government transformation," the paper explains.
The paper points out that the e-infrastructure set in place in the U.A.E. "offers the four main security features that any secured network should have for high-risk systems and applications. These are: authentication, data integrity, confidentiality and non-repudiation. This robust security and identity mechanism is important in order to build the required level of trust between the citizen on one side of the U.A.E.‘s identity infrastructure and the government on the other." "The U.A.E. national ID card architecture is designed to deal securely with the risk-prone transaction of critical information. The architecture, based on layered environments, takes into consideration critical concerns such as the privacy and protection of personal information, user authentication and validation, system user trust building and accountability, and government policies. The architecture provides a solution to handle the enrolment and management of information and profiles within the population register in a secure environment," the paper elucidates.
"In order to make e-government effective and inclusive, users of the information infrastructure of the country expect reliable security for their transactions to be in place. On the other hand, the expectation of government entities is that the users of their respective systems are authentic and legally entitled to be using the system," the paper says by way of conclusion.