Page 1 SECURITY CONCERNS IN EGOVERNMENT AGENT -BASED INTEROPERABILITY Fábio Marques 12 , Gonçalo Paiva Dias 13 , André Zúquete 24 Abstract – The use of Information and Communication Technology in the delivery of public services has a number of advantages. In a first approach, it allows pro- ductivity and quality improvements in the delivered services and it allows reduc- tions on the running costs. Furthermore, with interoperability between dispersed IT systems, it is possible to deliver enhanced, combined services. The security on eGovernment Information Systems is pivotal, even more when we are talking about security in interoperability eGovernment architectures. This paper presents a brief description of the functionalities of software agents and their important ro- le for building flexible, agent-based interoperability architectures. Our contribu- tion is the identification of new security issues inherent to agent-based interopera- bility architectures, some possible solutions to those issues and remaining open questions for future work. 1. Introduction E-Government is defined by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on government activities [1]. Nevertheless, there are other definitions; a short compilation can be found in [2]. In spite of the multitude of eGovernment definitions that coexist, all have a common baseline: the use of ICT. This means that ICT affects the way we interact with governments and the way governments interact with us. The use of ICT in the delivery of services brought a number of advantages to the Public Administration. This is noted in the improvement of the quality of services providing low- latency service delivery around the clock, in the reduction of exploitation costs, in the increase of productivity. On the other hand, it also brought a set of concerns, mostly security related. Just to mention a few: privacy of personal, sensitive information; and trust, relatively to the information given by the systems and/or on the systems themselves. 1.1 Interoperability frameworks The need to exchange information, either between government branches or to deliver services in a cooperative way, led to the creation of interoperability frameworks. These frameworks 1 Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão de Águeda, Universidade de Aveiro, 3750 – 127, Águeda, Rua Comandante Pinho e Freitas, nº28, {fabio, gpd}@ua.pt 2 Instituto de Engenharia Electrónica e Telemática de Aveiro, 3810 – 193, Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, {fabio, andre.zuquete}@ua.pt 3 Unidade de Investigação em Governança, Competividade e Políticas Públicas, 3810 – 193, Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, gpd@ua.pt 4 Departamento de Electrónica, Telecomunicações e Informática, Universidade de Aveiro, 3810 – 193, Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, andre.zuquete@ua.pt