Delivery of a Certified E-mail Service over the Digital Terrestrial Television Platform

At present, the electronic mail service is probably the most widespread and commonly used asynchronous way of exchanging information among people, thanks to its immediacy and easiness of use. Information delivered through e-mail can be sensitive or confidential: ensuring the sender’s identity and providing privacy has become a vital step in stopping spam, fraud and even more serious crimes. To this aim, public entities have adopted Certified E-mail systems to manage interactions with citizens. Digital Terrestrial Television introduced new facilities in the traditional broadcasting environment, and determined the transition of several Electronic based-services to Television based-services. The availability of commercial Set Top Boxes equipped with network interfaces and smart card readers enables the provisioning of a TV-based Certified E-mail service, requiring user’s identification and authentication. In this paper we discuss the challenges and opportunities of a Certified E-mail service over Digital Terrestrial Television, and present the case study of the Italian Regione Marche, in which this service is under development to support the remote request of certificates issued by the public administration. User authentication and secure access to the administrative services are addressed through the use of a Regional Service Card, an interactive application, and a centralized authentication framework.