• Worldwide, e-transactions are becoming the driving force for the social and economic development
• We are moving from the information economy to holistic digital economy

Day-to-day, the Digital Economy catches more and more the attention of governments around the world to become one of the main topics within their development strategies.

However, the big challenge facing governments and businesses alike is :

How to keep up with the tremendous progress in the digital world and keep their services and networks away from the cyber threats increasingly rising worldwide ? In order to ensure a smooth and successful transition to this new model, a big focus has to be done on e-trust mechanisms and tools.

Thus, the tremendous technological development must go in pair with the implementation of strong security tools on the technical level and the setting up of strong and flexible regulatory frameworks on the legal level being able to provide the required safety for the new forms of transactions on local, regional and international levels.

The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), is known as one of the strongest authentication security mechanisms. Advances in the field are happening quickly to meet the need of a secure and reliable online transactions between entities worldwide. PKI, is becoming a must-have technology since it provides a wide range of applications dealing with the identity authentication, confidentiality, access control, and security.

In this respect, the Arab ICT Organization (AICTO) has proposed the setting up of the “Arab-African e-Certification Authorities Network” in cooperation with the African Telecommunication Union (ATU).