Security of Critical Information Infrastructures: E-Governance and Standardization

Critical Information Infrastructure - CII is a key enabler of e-Governance. This infrastructure is composed of the Information and Communication Technologies ¿ICT- underpinning the higher level services to end users, and encompasses the Internet, fixed and mobile telecommunications and other systems. The gap between security solutions and security risks is continuously growing due to evolution of the ICT. Each new technology and application can include many flaws. Each flaw may pave the way to unauthorized users to accessing critical data and/or may mistakenly provide them with the ability to perform some harmful action. Nowadays, the CII is in a conversion phase towards the so-called Next Generation Networks ¿ NGNs. With this development, all telecommunication services will be built upon IP based networks. Naturally, these developments force the standardization bodies to adapt their rules and policies and thus to meet the security needs of these new CII components. E-government services such as administration, health, education etc. either create new services or replace existing manual procedural systems. These new services should offer higher availability, security and reliability with respect to current operations due to their increasing criticality. This criticality should be managed in innovative e-Governance arrangements among public and private actors: mainly the authorities and the operators of the CII, but also including all relevant stakeholders. In the meantime, the governments should be prepared for this new paradigm of e-Governance. The aim of this paper is to summarize the benefits and security risks of NGNs and emphasize the basis and requirements for that e-Governance.

MASERA Marcelo; 

ATAY Serap; 

2009-01-14

Society of Information Security

JRC48649

http://www.iscturkey.org/,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC48649,