In 2007/08 the German BLK-AG IT Justiz (Bund-Länder-Commission, IT-Justice-workgroup) had to develop a concept for registration and identity management of lawyers, courts and citizens with the concrete application of a secure electronic message exchange between these parties. Since secure access and registration is a common demand of most e-government (including e-justice-) applications it is desirable to have a common standard for governmental identity management. Such a standard will be necessary for later federation and reutilization of identities between governmental applications.
To promote the idea of a common standard, the concept was called SAFE (Secure Access to Federated E-Government) and was designed as an extension on top of a base document that is a new general approach for governmental identity management. It is based on the WS-* specification stack, including a WS-Trust Identity Provider and a foundation for active Federation of identities and SPML as the provisioning interface, but keepes design enhancement to a more general identity metasystem in mind. This new standard will hopefully evolve to a common identity management and registration infrastructure for German e-government applications.
