FASME pursues scientific, technological, and political objectives. Primary objectives are supra-or-ga-ni-zational interoperability, exploitation of JavaCard & CORBA technology, and reduction of European border-barriers. Secondary objectives are gaining practical experience with state-of-the-art social engineering, visual prototyping for a better integration of users in the specification process, identification of social constraints, rapid prototyping including end-user testing, documentation with formal models, and quality management in international, interdisciplinary projects. FASME heads for a specification of generic JavaCard services with respect to inter-organizational administration procedures and the demonstration of the feasibilty of these services by means of a prototypical implementation of JavaCard-based identity Cards for three European cities and three applications: change of place of residence, change of car licence, and customized user portals. The overall evaluation of the project will focus on the quality of the resulting 27 uni-directional communication channels, where each channel corresponds to one application, one source and one target city for the migration process. Hereby, quality is evaluated with respect to security, usability, performance, choice of the degree of transparence, and on the overall resulting trust and confidence.
Smartcards and in particular JavaCards offer the possibility that their owners control the access to their personal data. This creates new possibilities for the internetworking of different organizations on the level of processes. Personal data stay protected, when access to them is controlled by means of a JavaCard, and nevertheless, remote applications may access them upon a granting confirmation issued by the owner of the data. An integration of bio-sensors and cryptographic coprocessors further increases the quality of security control service provided by the Card. The Card then provides the following basic services: identification of the physical identity of the Card holder, transport of personal data and personal profiles on the Card, secure communication of personal data based on a public key scheme, and authorization of applications to access data based on digitally signed, time-stamped credentials. This is exactly what Card holders need to control access to their data, as long as they can trust the data management system, where data are stored.
As a result of the analysis of user requirements in FASME, we have identified the following generic non-digitalized business scenario: First, a citizen provides evidence of her identity and of personal data with hard copies personal documents. Second, the citizen applies for a service, which comprises a change of personal data - possibly the creation of new data at the place of residence or the deletion of data (or marking of data as invalid) at the old place of residence - and the issuing of a corresponding document. Third, the civil servant checks the lawfulness and legitimacy of the request, possibly interacting with civil servants or services from other department (e.g. in Italy the police will check, whether the citizen actually lives at the stated new place of residence). Fourth, either the civil servant completes the service locally or she creates a document that confirms the correctness of data delivered by the citizen to the office in charge of the requested service.
It is essential to understand the role signed, trustworthy data play in this process and how JavaCards enable citizens to control a secure data transfer. It results from our discussion that there is a very simple generic type of service which enables us to digitalize the administrative processes and that this type of service is not restricted to administrative applications, but it can be applied whenever trust in digital data constitutes a value. Any generic SW-solution for this service type is thus widely applicable. The true problem for the development of a SW/organizational solution are the cultural differences among different organizations.
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