X-Road

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X-Road Estonian Interoperability Platform

• Arne Ansper, arne_at_cyber.ee
• Cybernetica, www.cyber.ee

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Introduction Problem

• In the beginning of the decade, Estonian
  governmental IT systems suffered from poor
  interconnectivity
• Establishing new connections between governmental
  databases and systems was time-consuming and
  expensive
• Department of State Information Systems decided
  to improve the situation and solve the
  interconnectivity problems

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Introduction Solution

• Proposed solution
• Creation of the national middleware that would
  provide unified access to all governmental
  databases
• Using web services as underlying technology
• Governmental X-Road program was launched to
  fulfil this vision and to create and run the
  system
• Cybernetica was contracted to design and build
  the system

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Introduction Cybernetica

• Estonian RD company, active in the field of
  information security
• Data communication security
• Digital signature and time-stamping technology
• e-Voting (first parliamentary elections over
  Internet in the world)
• Development of security critical distributed
  systems
• Consulting, auditing

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Goal

• To build an infrastructure that would
• allow effortless access to the data in state
  registries
• without compromising the security of the data and
  
• with minimal impact to the existing systems.

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Background

• Many registries, all very different, managed and
  developed by different organizations and financed
  separately
• Many users, most of them are very small
  organizations without security knowledge and with
  a very small IT budget
• High security requirements. Registries contain
  personal data that is in some cases used to make
  high value decisions and in some cases needed in
  real time

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Unification Requirements

• Unified legal framework
• Unified security measures the initial cost of
  implementing the security measures will be
  amortized across all the state registry
  connections
• Unified API all applications must be able to
  access all state registries in a similar way
• Unified installation and management all
  installations should look like same

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Security Requirements

• Required security properties by priority
• Evidentiary value, authenticity, integrity
• Availability
• Confidentiality

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Security Requirements

• All applications required authenticity, integrity
  and assurance that it is possible to proof to the
  third party the origin of some data, received
  over X-Road
• In addition, it was envisioned that X-Road would
  be used by time-critical applications, like for
  performing the checks on the border. So,
  availability was next in the list of priorities
• And finally, the confidentiality was required in
  most, but not all cases

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Approach to Solution

• Develop system for highest security requirements
• That could be used by smallest organizations
• Encapsulate the complexity
• Provide functionality

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Components of the Solution

• X-Road is
• Organization
• Legislation
• Infrastructure
• Technology

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Central Agency

• X-Road has central agency that ensures its
  operation
• Ensures the legal status of the X-Road and the
  information exchanged via it, by enforcing the
  stated policies
• Responsible for steering the further development
  of the X-Road and ensuring its consistency and
  integrity

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Central Services

• Certification authority
• Directory service
• Time-stamping service
• Monitoring service - detecting security breaches,
  collecting the statistics
• Web-based portal for citizens and smaller
  organizations - access to services in a simple
  and centralized way

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Infrastructure

• Based on web services - well supported,
  easy-to-use, vendor and platform neutral message
  exchange protocol
• SOAP and XMLRPC, with two-way transliteration
• Synchronous and asynchronous operation
• SOAP attachments
• X-Road servers can process messages with
  unlimited size

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Infrastructure

• Meta-services that can be used to find out the
  structure and properties of the system
• List of other organizations
• List of services
• Formal description of the services for automatic
  generation of the user interfaces

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Infrastructure
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Infrastructure
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Infrastructure
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Technology Deployment

• Self-contained standardized monofunctional
  server
• Common PC hardware
• Free software
• GNU/Debian Linux based
• Automated installer for Linux and X-Road
• Minimal GUI
• Built-in patching system
• Cheap and easy to install and run
• At the same time - secure

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Technology Evidentiary Value

• All outgoing messages are signed
• All incoming messages are logged and time-stamped
• Message receiver can later prove with the help of
  the X-Road central agency when and by whom was
  the message sent.

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Technology Availability

• Distributed system, with minimal number of
  central services
• Secure DNS (DNS-SEC) provides robust, scalable
  directory service with built-in caching and
  redundancy
• Protocol supports redundant servers and load
  sharing
• Mechanisms against DoS attacks

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Technology Access Control

• X-Road core deals only with inter-organizational
  access control, where access is granted to
  organization as whole
• Organization must ensure that only right people
  can use this service, by using whatever technical
  means it sees appropriate
• This obligation is enforced by service
  provisioning contract between the organizations

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Two Level Access Control

• Balanced use of technical and organizational
  security measures
• The impact to the existing systems was minimized
• Biggest success factor of the X-Road

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Current Status

• In production from 2002
• 65 service providers
• 398 service consumers
• 30 million transactions on 2006

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Future International Usage?

• Independent deployment in other country or domain
• Interoperability between countries / domains

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Deployment in Other Country

• Creation of the Central Agency
• Establishing the legal status
• Setting up the technical system
• Creation of the services
• Creation of the consumers

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Interoperability

• Amendments needed to legal and technical systems
• Bilateral agreements between countries
• Solutions for certification and directory
  infrastructure - future research and development
  needed

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Thank you!