Eng. Abdullah Nasser Al Ghannam

Abdullah holds an M.Sc. with Distinction, Computing. School of Informatics, Bradford University, UK. His dissertation was about network security and QoS routing, 2002. Previously, he had a B.Sc., Electrical Engineering, College of Engineering, KSU. Currently, he is R&D Deputy Director, R&D. Dept. National Information Center, where he also acts as Project Manager for PKI Implementation and Team leader of PKI design review, Security research and studies manager, as well as working previously as Project Manager, Study of Wireless connectivity of police vehicles to NIC DB. Other jobs held by Engineer Al Ghannam include, Senior Network Design Eng, Senior RF Design Eng., RF Eng. Research and Development Center. He has the following professional certifications: MCP, MCP+I and MCSE, ITIL foundation, and CISSP.
PKI Project at Ministry of Interior
The National Information Centre (MOI-NIC) has invested in a state of the art infrastructure to e-enable its services through the implementation of the MOI-NIC PKI and portal. As with any e-Government or e-Commerce initiative, security plays an important role. To ensure the highest degree of security for the transactions done by the citizens, the National ID cards will be used by the citizens to authenticate themselves and sign transactions. These cards are personalized with digital certificates issued by the ID card Certificate Authority which is part of the MOI-NIC PKI infrastructure. In order to provide the required security, a user friendly, a citizen centric service environment and ensure non repudiation of transactions, MOI-NIC has launched the PKI project to enhance its infrastructure with: A Role Based Access Control (RBAC) system that will handle end-entities (citizen, MOI-NIC staff, etc) authentication as well as the access to MOI-NIC protected e-services through a policy based access control. A Document Management (Archival) System which provides long term archiving and retrieval for signed eForms created by the MOI-NIC portal. Enabling smart ID card holders to access the MOI-NIC e-services portal. The presentation will address MOI experience with PKI where the applications, challenges and issues related to this technology are investigated.