Abstract
In Estonia, the X-Road infrastructure for unified governmental database access has been in use for more than 10 years. The number of queries mediated over the X-Road has exceeded 240 million per year. Even though all the queries and replies are signed by using the X-Road’s own PKI facilities, the resulting signatures are not fully qualified in the sense of the Estonian Digital Signatures Act that requires the use of hardware-protected keys. In order to replace software-protected keys in the X-Road infrastructure with a moderate-cost hardware solution, there are several technical issues to be solved, most notably performance requirements, since the operations needed to achieve qualified signatures (obtaining OCSP responses and time stamps) require time. The topic of this paper is to propose organisational and technical solutions to overcome these challenges. A novel batch signature and time stamp format is proposed allowing to perform many PKI operations at the price of one, helping to meet the performance requirements.
This research has been supported by European Union through European Regional Development Fund under ELIKO Competence Center (EU30017) and EXCS Center of Excellence in Computer Science.
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Ansper, A., Buldas, A., Freudenthal, M., Willemson, J. (2013). High-Performance Qualified Digital Signatures for X-Road. In: Riis Nielson, H., Gollmann, D. (eds) Secure IT Systems. NordSec 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8208. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41488-6_9
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