Assessment of Electronic Authentication Policies Using Multi-Stakeholder Multi-Criteria Hierarchical Decision Modeling

Standards allow society to be efficient, and interconnected. For expediency, a country may adopt a policy of domestic standards which may require reconsideration to conform to international ones to support global markets. However, the policy reform process is complex because adopting standards involves not only technological, but also political, economic, and social perspectives. Also, there may be conflict and dissent between the transition winners and losers. An effective method to rationally assess and rank policy alternatives is with a hierarchical decision model (HDM) that includes competing perspectives and their respective criteria. In the early 2000s, the South Korean government standardized and mandated electronic authentication technologies to mitigate technological gaps in e-commerce. However, this standardization also created problems causing Korea to lag in online security and being limited to a Microsoft-specific monoculture. Internationally, other de facto standards have been adopted such as secure sockets layer (SSL), and blockchain is being considered. In 2015, the Korean government eventually changed its policy by eliminating the e-commerce mandate to enable banks and other institutions to adopt different standards. This policy reform took sixteen years because of its pervasiveness. In this study, a HDM is developed specifically for Korea to assess the post-reform policy options.