An Overview of Public Key Certificate Support for Canada’s Government On-Line (GOL) Initiative

The Canadian Federal Government is delivering on-line services to its citizens. A critical feature for ensuring the acceptance of these services is to ensure that security and privacy requirements are met. To this end, Canadian citizens may obtain an epass allowing them to securely obtain services through a government program web site. Technically, an epass is composed of a pseudonymous public key certificate. In this paper, we analyze the system in which this epass is managed and used, with particular emphasis as to how it supports the security and privacy of Canadian citizens.