To review the subject of digital identification technologies I needed firstly to separate two big issues in it: legal and technological. Structurally one of it depends on the other but in theory to review them we need to have their independent development and should separate one from other. It is also required to identify the target of this review, as the literature of authentication systems is enormous and it is impossible to completely full review it in this small report. Nevertheless the most important studies are discussed below. We are focusing on new technology of digital identification in the age of e-business and e-governance. Defining the objective of the research we are aiming to identify the turning-point when most of authors start to write about stupendous demand of new authentication systems and define the new technology for these systems. Some authors define the goals for these systems, others mainly describe systems and operations.

The main study that is very closely related to this research is so far an article Electronic Government: Towards New Forms of Authentication, Citizenship and Governance, (2006). According to the authors the great demand of authentication systems in systems of e-government and e-commerce consumers’ relations. The author argues that the design of Identity managements (IDM) systems should not be examined because of the technical issues in the framework of establishment better e-government or e-commerce systems but also as wider and fundamental exploration and incorporation of social design issues concerning more deep relations within consumers and citizens with governments and companies (Lips et al., 2006). Of course, their work pays attention to the fear that any new IDM brings with the possibilities of society surveillance, which always exists while integrating these new systems. Most interesting presentation in the article is the framework of the project used in the research. Project “Privacy and Identity Management for Europe” (PRIME) has been developed and implemented by group of scholars who aim to identify the needs of authentication systems in Europe and to find technical solutions for it. The most interesting achievement of PRIME project is the establishment of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). PET mainly offers personal data control to users rather than to service providing organisations and, at the same time, protects the security of e-relationships through the use of encryption techniques. This focuses on users definitely determines the future of authentication technologies: User-Centric identity management. Here the systems offer users to define the degree of anonymity they would like to have in e-service relations.¹ In the third chapter of this article the author go for IDM innovations and describe mainly future IDM systems and nowadays developments. They state that this development will bring grate citizen empowerment and perfect democracy and it would reinforce powerful actors in becoming ‘bigger brothers’ than ever before. The most important part of work is the further analysis of two lenses on modern authentication systems policy design: the Government Gateways Project, UK and DigiD initiative, the Netherlands, both of which are e-government’s identifications systems. Examining these projects from Technical and Internal Governments Lenses she came to conclusion that technical standardisation of these new authentication and identity management systems for e-service provision may appear to be an obvious development, with similar policy design but different methods of implementations.

Here we can clearly see the importance of researching and developing of Digital Identification Technologies to establish good eGovernance in EU.

Albert Poghosyan

1. LIPS, M., OII, TAYLOR, J. & J. O., O. (2006) Electronic Government: Towards New Forms of Authentication, Citizenship and Governance. Oxford Internet Institute. [↩]

With the development of Internet Economy the importance of representing the citizen’s identity has been raised increasingly.

Nowadays, lots of websites providing different kinds of online services as well as even governmental agencies providing core services on the Internet are in need of very strong and user friendly authentication systems. This should mainly help in decreasing the Internet fraud and increasing user confidence and probably even e-citizens’ participation in eGovernance processes. This very important issue has its own history and evolution, which brought the author of this paper to conducting empirical research in this field.
Authentication is the act of establishing or confirming something (or someone) as authentic, that is that claims made by or about the thing are true (Wikipedia, 2006). Authenticating a person may mean to identify that the person is who he/she says he/she is. In case of organizations they can present their Trust Certificate, but in case of a person - it is just impossible without special technologies. However, in many cases the authentication is the most important stage of Internet Interaction. For a long time authentication procedures in the area of service provision were, of course, paper-based (even now some companies request scanned copy of passport by email). And, probably, the best examples of self identification were passport or driving licence. Meanwhile with the arrival of digital technologies to our society that enabled the development of online services, it became clear that new forms of authentication are required for situations in which the digital user’s identity must be checked as part of an assessment of service entitlement. In last decade lots of complicated systems have been developed aiming to solve this issue. But let’s go a little deeper into evolution of these systems.

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