A certified email system for the public administration in Italy

The growth of Internet services poses problems of security assurance such as providing trustiness of on-line transactions, guaranteeing user privacy, and furnishing message confidentiality. This paper describes issues related to sending documents via "certified email", as required by Italian law. Issues of cryptography and digital signature are introduced followed by a brief description of the certified email system we developed, which successfully passed the interoperability and technical test carried out by the National Center for Informatics in the Public Administration of Italy