ICT industry stakeholders drawn from different countries have met in Nairobi to discuss ways of unlocking digital trust, a move that could see more opportunities being realised within the digital economy.
During a two-day 2024 National Public Key Infrastructure Forum hosted by the Communications Authority of Kenya, experts from Uganda, Cameroon, India, Cote d’Ivoire, South Africa, and Ghana are discussing the need for developing standards that can enable the consumption of digital innovations in a secure way across the borders.
Collaborations IN Building Trust In The Digital Economy
PS Kisiang’ani called upon more collaborations within the cybersecurity industry to develop frameworks to facilitate safe digital platform transactions.
Speaking on digital trust and e-commerce, Philip Irode, Deputy Director of Information Security at the ICT Authority, called on other certification agencies to collaborate with the ICT Authority in the process of issuance of digital signatures.
‘‘As a government certification Authority, we have to acknowledge and therefore recognize digital signatures issued by other registration agencies because it is through that recognition that you are able to ascertain that these digital signatures are valid and recognized. So, the chain of security from the issuing Authority to the individual signing it is actually assured by that mutual collaboration”, said Irode.
‘‘We really want our citizenry to adopt online services and the ICT Authority is here through the issuance of digital signatures that will make, number one, cost of transactions cheaper, two, we are breaking the barriers of bureaucracy and we are also reducing the cost and time in the turn around time of in whatever service or transaction one is doing.” he added.
The National Public Key Infrastructure (NPKI) is a system used for the creation, storage, and distribution of digital certificates, which are used to verify that a particular public key (online/virtual identity) belongs to a certain entity.
Digital signatures also help identify transacting parties to confirm whether the transaction has been changed or not and to prove the facts of the transaction.
The need for proper identification of digital signatures has become more crucial as more government services become digitized, noting that more than 15,000 government services have been uploaded to the e-citizen platform.
The experts also called upon regulators and standardization bodies within cyberspace to develop standards that promote harmonization and interoperability of the innovations.
