Advanced Biometric Electronic Signature in Practice – Lessons for the Public Administration from a Hungarian Case Study

Authors:
Péter Máté Erdősi, National University of Public Service, Institute of e-Government, Budapest

Abstract:

Signing documents is one of the most general requirements in our daily lives, including routines in Public Administration. After significant development of e-Administration, the question arose as to how the clients can sign documents electronically. The European Union legislated this question by the Regulation (EU) No. 910/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 July 2014 on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market and repealing Directive 1999/93/EC. This Regulation (henceforward: eIDAS) gives a technology-neutral and high-level framework for using electronic signatures in the EU, it refers several implementing acts and standards, records applicable concepts and definitions, and declares several obligations for all Member States. The Regulation does not contain strong provisions for advanced electronic signature, but it defines four requirements for it. All electronic signatures which fulfil these four requirements have to be considered as advanced electronic signatures. In most of the cases, creating an advanced signature is easier and more cost-effective than creating a qualified signature, therefore it may be an alternative solution for signing documents in Public Administration also. This paper intends to summarize the relating legal environment and it demonstrates an implemented solution of advanced biometric signature in the private sector. Finally, we discuss the technical conditions of the applicability of advanced biometric electronic signature in Public Administration by discovering similarities and differences of application and acceptability.

References:

[1] CSÓTÓ, M., Aki (információ)szegény, az a legszegényebb? Az információs szegénység megjelenési formái, (Is the poorest the one who is (information) poor? Forms of information poverty), Információs Társadalom, XVII. évf. (2017) 2. szám, 8-29. old. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.22503/inftars.XVII.2017.2.1, 2017. [2] Eds. DEMETER, E., PETÉNYI, S., Jelentés a Jó Állam Véleményfelmérésről (Report on the Good State Survey), Nordex Nonproft – Dialóg Campus, 2017. [3] FENG, H., WAH, C. C., Private key generation from on-line handwritten signatures, Information Management & Computer Security, 2002 10(4) pp.159-164. [4] HUNGARIAN ASSOCIATION FOR ELECTRONIC SIGNATURES, Issue of Applying Biometric Electronic Signatures, Budapest, 2016. [5] Ed. KAISER, T., Jó Állam Jelentés 2017 (Good State Report 2017), Dialóg Campus, 2017. [6] MALIK, M. I., AHMED, S., MARCELLI, A., PAL, U., BLUMENSTEIN, M., ALEWIJNS, L., LIWICKI, M., ICDAR2015 competition on signature verification and writer identification for on-and off-line skilled forgeries (SigWIcomp2015), In Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 2015 13th International Conference on (pp. 1186-1190), IEEE, Nancy, France, 2015. [7] MANN, D., GUPTA, S., SHARMA, A., AKHTAR, S., Digital Signature Using Biometrics, in: Proceedings of the World Congress on Engineering and Computer Science 2015 Vol I, San Francisco, USA, 2015. [8] KESSEM, L., Future of Identity Study – Consumer perspectives on authentication: Moving beyond the password. IBM Security, Cambridge, USA. 2018. [9] MOHAMMADI, S., ABEDI, S., ECC-Based Biometric Signature: A New Approach in Electronic Banking Security, In: International Symposium on Electronic Commerce and Security, 2008. [10] NIST, Special Publication 800-63-3, Digital Identity Guidelines, USA, 2017. [11] ORVOS, P., SELÉNYI, E., HORNYÁK, Z., Towards Biometric Digital Signatures, in: Networkshop 2002 Conference, Eger, Hungary, 2002. [12] PARZIALE, A., DIAZ, M., FERRER, M. A., MARCELLI, A., Do synthetic generated signatures reflect the subject motor programs? A pilot study, Proceedings of 18th IGS Conference, June 2017, Gaeta, Italy, (pp. 119-122.), 2017. [13] PINTERIČ, U., Limitations of the e-Participation, In Hendrik Hansen, Robert Müller-Török, András Nemeslaki, Johannes Pichler, Alexander Prosser, Dona Scloa (eds.), CEE e|Dem and e|Gov Days 2017, Digital Divide in the Danube Region: Is it still significant in explaining ICT adoption in eDemocracy and eGovernment? Proceedings of the Central and Eastern Eurpoean e|Dem and e|Gov Days 2017 May 4-5 Budapest (pp. 89-96), Austrian Computer Society, Vienna, Austria, 2017. [14] SORIN DAN, S., Digital Divide in the EU countries from the Danube Region, In Hendrik Hansen, Robert Müller-Török, András Nemeslaki, Johannes Pichler, Alexander Prosser, Dona Scloa (eds.), CEE e|Dem and e|Gov Days 2017, Digital Divide in the Danube Region: Is it still significant in explaining ICT adoption in eDemocracy and eGovernment? Proceedings of the Central and Eastern Eurpoean e|Dem and e|Gov Days 2017 May 4-5 Budapest (pp. 79-86), Austrian Computer Society, Vienna, Austria, 2017.

Publication:

Central and Eastern European e|Dem and e|Gov Days 2018

Including a Workshop on Smart Cities organized by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe
Proceedings of the Central and Eastern European E|Dem and E|Gov Days, May 3-4, 2018, Budapest
Facultas, 1. Ed. (14 May 2018), 506 p.
ISBN-10: 9783708917375,
ISBN-13: 978-3708917375,
ASIN: 3708917375506

Editors: Hendrik Hansen, Robert Müller-Török, András Nemeslaki, Alexander Prosser, Dona Scola, Tamás Szádeczky