Harnessing Electronic Signatures to Improve the Security of SMS-Based Services

Powered by the emergence of information and communication technologies, governments and public administrations are nowadays offering online services to facilitate the execution of governmental procedures. Citizens, businesses, and even governments themselves benefit from greater flexibility and cost efficiency of such e-Government services. Recently, the increased mobility of citizens and the growing popularity of mobile communication technologies has raised the need for mobile governmental services. Such services have become known under the term m-Government. Interestingly, most m-Government services still rely on SMS technology. Reasons for that are the simplicity, inexpensiveness and wide support of this technology. Despite these various advantages, a lack of supported security features usually hinders SMS to be used in transactional m-Government services, as these services have higher security requirements. To bypass this issue, we propose a method to enhance SMS-based m-Government services by means of electronic signatures. Our solution allows citizens to generate, electronically sign, and deliver electronic documents by sending well-defined SMS messages. We demonstrate the practical applicability of our approach by means of a prototypical implementation. A detailed discussion of different security aspects of our solution concludes this contribution.