Adaptable security mechanism for dynamic environments

Electronic services in dynamic environment (e.g. e-government, e-banking, e-commerce, etc.), meet many different barriers reducing their efficient applicability. One of them is the requirement of information security when it is transmitted, transformed, and stored in an electronicservice. It ispossibletoprovide the appropriate level ofsecuritybyapplying the present-day information technology. However, the level of protection of information is often much higher than it is necessary to meet potential threats. Since the level of security strongly affects the performance of the whole system, the excessive protection decreases its reliability and availability and, as a result, its global security. In this paper we present a mechanism of adaptable security for, digital information transmission systems (being usually the crucial part of e-service). It makes it possible to guarantee the adequate level of protection for actual level of threats dynamically changing in the environment. In our model the basic element of the security is the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is enriched with specific cryptographic modules. a 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.