Security of E-Government Website Encryption in Germany and Hungary

The paper deals with comparative research of the communication security of e-Government services in Germany and Hungary. The focus point of the research is to analyse the cryptographic security algorithms and protocols which encrypt communication in the relations of the citizen and a governmental body. The analysis includes the general e-Government portals, central web services, and specialised services, like taxation and criminal record extracts. The actuality of the topic lies in the fact that the security of the citizens’ personal data, used, stored and transferred by the governmental bodies can be in danger. Two examples are the loss of 25 million UK citizens’ personal data in 2007 because of a failure of the UK Customs Service and the compromise personally identifiable information of 191 million US citizens, stored in the Voter Database in 2015. The goal of the research is to check the current practice used for governmental communication, based on international standards and current practices. The study compares the e-administration systems of a country of Central Europe which is considered less developed in e-government systems and processes than a Western European country. Based on the evaluation, which can be found at the end of this study, those persons who are responsible for the operation of such systems, can see the actual benchmarks of the communication security. So, this way they can learn about the usage of what communication protocols and cryptographic algorithms are recommended and under what settings.