Abstract
Usability and security are crucial requirements of efficient e-Government services and applications. Given security requirements are mostly met by integration of approved cryptographic methods such as two-factor authentication and qualified electronic signatures. Integration of these technologies into e-Government applications usually introduces additional complexity and often affects the usability of these solutions. So far, research on usability as efficiency-measuring instrument in e-Government has primarily focused on the evaluation of e-Government Web sites only. Usability issues raised by the integration of security-enhancing technologies into e-Government applications have not been considered in detail yet. We filled this gap by conducting a usability analysis of three core components of the Austrian e-Government infrastructure to improve efficiency in this domain. The evaluated components act as middleware and facilitate integration of e-ID and e-Signature tokens such as smart cards and mobile phones into e-Government applications. We have assessed the usability and perceived security of these middleware components by means of a thinking-aloud test with 20 test users. This chapter introduces the evaluated components, discusses the followed methodology, and presents obtained results of the conducted usability test.
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Notes
- 1.
At the present time, this Directive is still the basis for electronic signatures across Europe. However, the European Commission is currently working on a new proposal for a regulation (EU Parliament and Council 2012).
- 2.
Two-factor authentication defines an authentication approach requiring the presentation of two different authentication factors, e.g., something the user possesses (e.g., smart card) and something the user knows (e.g., password).
- 3.
In this context, a middleware constitutes an intermediary layer between the application and the underlying CC implementation. The middleware thereby hides CC-implementation specifics and provides easy access to CC functionality for the application.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
A one-time password constitutes a password which is valid for one transaction or one login only.
- 9.
- 10.
This typical demo e-Government application consists of filling out a form and signing it (using a CCS) afterwards.
- 11.
Therefore, the test users have been requested to execute Tasks T1, T2, and T3 beforehand.
- 12.
- 13.
Note that we were forced to schedule the evaluation of the Mobile Phone Signature after evaluation of the two smart card-based CCS implementations. This was due to the fact that the activation process of the Mobile Phone Signature was part of the usability test (Task T4). Since the activation process required a Citizen Card-based user authentication, either MOCCA Local or MOCCA Online was required to activate the Mobile Phone Signature.
- 14.
This was due to the fact that a test instance of MOCCA Online has been used during the tests. The Java Applet of this test instance was signed with a test certificate only.
- 15.
According to Nielsen (2013), a group of five people is fully sufficient for such tests (this number has been also reached for each subgroup of the test users).
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Zefferer, T., Krnjic, V., Stranacher, K., Zwattendorfer, B. (2014). Measuring Usability to Improve the Efficiency of Electronic Signature-Based e-Government Solutions. In: RodrÃguez-BolÃvar, M. (eds) Measuring E-government Efficiency. Public Administration and Information Technology, vol 5. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9982-4_4
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