Proposed Framework for Official Document Sharing and Verification in E-government Environment Based on Blockchain Technology

: Progression in Computer networks and emerging of new technologies in this field helps to find out new protocols and frameworks that provides new computer network-based services. E-government services, a modernized version of conventional government, are created through the steady evolution of technology in addition to the growing need of societies for numerous services. Government services are deeply related to citizens’ daily lives; therefore, it is important to evolve with technological developments—it is necessary to move from the traditional methods of managing government work to cutting-edge technical approaches that improve the effectiveness of government systems for providing services to citizens. Blockchain technology is among the modern technologies highly suitable for developing digital governance services


Introduction:
The continuous developments of computer networks take variant approaches of work. Some of works is focusing on improving existent technologies, other works focuses on developing novel technologies in computer network to allow for providing new types of services 1,2 . Virtually all elements of business and governmental work utilize the Internet or computer networks, and the digital transformation of these sectors has highlighted the importance of sharing sensitive and dangerous information safely. Although email, web applications, and the Cloud are commonly used to share information, relying on a third party to transmit data in particular applications may not be an option. As a result, the need to deploy a system that can be utilized to share data in a controlled and private manner has arisen. To fill this void, blockchain technology emerged as an Internet trust protocol. Apart from its capacity to share data in a controlled and privacy-preserving manner, blockchain includes immutable records of transactions among a network of nodes. The history of blockchain technology started when Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta described a chain of blocks using a hash function, digital signature, and time stamp for security in 1991; this was the birth of blockchain 3 . However, the greatest growth in blockchain technology was introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto as a secure framework to allow peer-to-peer Bitcoin transactions 4 . In 2014, blockchain 2.0 was introduced, which separated blockchain from bitcoins and allowed applications beyond cryptocurrencies. In this era, Ethereum and other platforms emerged and began implementing blockchain applications. Currently, decentralized file storage and decentralized autonomous group access are two examples of blockchain technology's application 5 . E-government is one industry that has benefited from the birth and advancement of blockchain technology. E-government refers to governmental agencies' use of information technology to improve the delivery of public sector services to citizens and improve the efficiency of government management 6 . The following are the key advantages of e-government [6][7][8] :  Less corruption: Through e-government, government corruption vulnerability is reduced by increasing the monitoring capacity of stakeholders.  Increased transparency: E-government improves transparency by providing wide monitoring coverage and collaboration with stakeholders.  Greater convenience: E-government is a commitment to improving the satisfaction of citizens through the efficient delivery of services by governmental agencies. Citizens' satisfaction includes effective service costs in addition to increased responsiveness when delivering these services.  Revenue growth: Government revenue increases when fraud and the shadow economy are reduced. The shadow economy includes economic activities that escape detection in official estimates, leading to reduced tax revenue and forcing governments to find other sources of revenue to finance public spending.  Administrative burden reduction: Administration burdens have costs resulting from government-imposed legislation and regulation on businesses and citizens complying with their obligations.
The main challenges that face the implementation of e-government systems are 6 :  Lack of general standards to implement egovernment systems.
 The challenge of privacy invasion.  Security threats. In this paper, the work of administration departments in public and private sector institutions has been considered. The work of these departments focusses on archiving official documents, retrieving archived documents as needed, and the verification of the veracity and existence of documents. These services are vital for governmental work because they represent the bottleneck of the system if there are many requests at the same time. Usually, official documents contain information needed for other work, for example, you may request retrieval and verification of financial documents before using the information in these documents to create a report on the expenditures of the institutions during a period of time. The query related to the existence and veracity of the financial documents must be answered very quickly in order to proceed with writing the required report.
In this work, development of a general framework to improve e-government services by using blockchain technology has been presented. This work aims to digitally transform the work of administration departments. Two typical services offered by most government agencies' administration departments and used a blockchain system to reformulate them were looked at: 1-Storing official letters in a blockchain system and 2-Verifying the veracity of these documents. Although there are a number of archiving systems, such as Amazon S3 Glacier and Microsoft Exchange, these archiving applications participated the idea of using a third party to coordinate and control the flow of work of the administration and the management of official documents. The existence of a third party is considered a potential bottleneck and is contrary to the principle of transparency 9 . The main contributions of this work are as follows: 1. The design and implementation of a blockchain-based framework to share and manage official documents in a controlled manner. 2. The archival and the management of official documents without using a third party. This will add transparency to archiving systems. 3. Testing the effectiveness of using blockchain technology to implement an egovernment system. The suggested framework is assessed using two metrics: Firstly. throughput, which is defined as the number of completed transactions in a given amount of time, transactions are either request retrieving documents or verification of existence of a document. Secondly, the variation of the response of the portal is also tested according to the increment in number of transactions. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews related work in the blockchain domain, Section 3 briefly describes the background that were depended on to implement the proposed system, Section 4 introduces the proposed blockchain-based administration department in an e-government context, Section 5 describes our framework and results, and Section 6 is the conclusion and suggestions for future development.

Related Work
Many researchers have investigated the role of blockchain technology to improve aspects of egovernment; here, some of these studies were considered. Cai and Zhu 10 focused on fraud detection and reduction and concluded that blockchain systems are effective for preventing fraud, especially loan application fraud. However, their effectiveness is limited in subjective information fraud where the truth is not easily validated. Hou 11 discussed the application of blockchain technology in egovernment, particularly in a Chinese context. The article found that blockchain technology brings benefits such as improvements in government services and information-sharing across different organizations. However, security, cost, and reliability are still major problems in such applications. Therefore, he concluded that it is crucial to establish a platform to apply blockchain technology in e-government. Liu et al. 12 discussed the potential risk of privacy disclosure that citizens may face when their data is shared among government departments. They concluded that the use of blockchain to implement e-government services would enhance the security, credibility, and responsiveness of information sharing between departments and protect the privacy of citizens. Naiknavare et al. 9 suggested a blockchain-based solution to achieve transparency in nongovernmental agencies (NGOs). The aim of the proposed solution is to ensure trust between donors and NGOs. Ghani et al. 13 introduced a proposed framework for ecertification sharing using blockchain technology. Graduates, recruiting agencies, and universities around the world may be involved in this system. The system was evaluated for the average response time on a batch of transactions requesting the verification of students' e-certifications.
All these researchers have studied using blockchain technology by applying one or more features of the blockchain technology for egovernment services. In this work, the work and services of the administration department in conventional governmental work have been studied and transformed digitally using blockchain technology, considering all benefits gained from the related work to improve the service of archiving official documents as well as all the services related to this work.

Background
This section presents the background used to implement the proposed administration department system in an e-government context using blockchain technology.

Blockchain Technology Concepts
Internet technology is constantly evolving, and the main direction of its evolution is decentralization. Therefore, blockchain technology is considered as the future internet. Blockchain is described as a distributed system to store information for a decentralized network 14 . Nodes in a blockchain network have a copy of the distributed ledger in addition to the facilities and skills to interpret the data and verify the data within the blockchain. The relation among nodes within a blockchain network is peer-to peer; they do not rely on a trusted third party. Each node examines a received transaction and decides to either commit that transaction to its copy of the ledger, depending on the consensus scheme, or to reject it. When a block is mined using a consensus scheme, this new block is broadcast to all the nodes within the blockchain network. The nodes will then commit it to their copy of the ledger 15 . Each block consists of two parts: A header and the data. The header consists of various fields, depending on the construction platform and the application itself. Typically, the header has a cryptographic hash of the previous block in the chain, the root hash of the Merkle Tree, the time stamp, the goal of the current difficulty, and the nonce (a four-byte field that usually starts with zero). The data part of the block contains the transactions. The predetermined block and transaction sizes determine the maximum number of transactions within a block 16 .
The Merkle Tree is an intrinsic component of blockchain; it is a hierarchical data structure that enables the secure verification of data collections and is used to organize a large amount of information and to verify this information efficiently and quickly. The Merkle Root is used to accelerate transaction verifications and to check for the existence of a specific transaction in a certain block [17][18][19] .
A consensus algorithm is a protocol through which all parties in a distributed computing environment agree on a single data value. It is an essential element in blockchain and is used to guarantee the integrity and security of the data in the distributed ledger. Consensus algorithms are categorized into two types 20 : Proof-based and votebased consensus algorithms. In the first type, nodes should prove that they have performed sufficient verifications to obtain the right to do the transaction, thereby adding work to the ledger and getting the rewards. In the second type, messages are exchanged among the nodes in order to agree on the blocks or transactions to be added to the ledger 21 . The blockchain framework is illustrated in Fig. 1.

Smart Contracts
Smart contracts are considered the digital form of traditional contracts. They are usually stored on a blockchain and can self-execute if the entities of the contract have met the predetermined terms and conditions of the contract 22 . In addition, it is a predetermined contract that is provable without the need for a trusted party 17 . Entities depend on the conditions and terms of the smart contract to enter into the agreement determined by the contract. Since the contract terms are transparent to these entities, they ensure the integrity of the contract, and they would be able to check the immutability of the blockchain and no party will alter the conditions and terms of that contract in the future. Blockchain-based applications reap huge benefits from using smart contracts 22 : 1. High throughput and efficient and accurate work due to the immediate execution of the digital contract when the terms are met. 2. High transparency and security because a peer-to-peer protocol to share encrypted transaction records is used. Additionally, each record is connected to the previous and subsequent records on a distributed ledger; therefore, altering the content of a record would alter the entire chain. 3. Saving time and money because there is no need for a third party to handle transactions.

Blockchain Technology for E-government
Applying blockchain technology to egovernment has many advantages, and e-government leverages the intrinsic features of blockchain technology. Therefore, the advantages of using blockchain technology to develop an e-government framework are as follows 23 :  Allowing secure storage of government, citizen, and business data.  Allowing controlled information sharing.  Reducing management costs for process auditing.  Reducing potentials of corruption and abuse.  Eliminating third parties.  Increasing trust in government and online services. While blockchain has many specifications that make it promising as an efficient framework for egovernment, there are challenges that could exploit blockchain in e-government, such as the following:  It is an emerging technology.  It lacks experts and policies.  It is ambiguous when it comes to scalability and interoperability.

The Work of Administration Departments in Government Institutions
The main task of the administration department in any government institution is to issue and archive official letters, retrieve them upon request, and provide relevant parties with a copy. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the administration department to issue, document, and preserve the official letters in a way that prevents any future changes to and falsification of them. The traditional tasks of the administration department are as follows: A. The process of issuing official letters according to the following stages: a) Typing official letters. b) Sending official letters to the director of the governmental institution for signing. c) Providing official letters with numbers and dates. d) Issuing official letters. e) Archiving the letters in the administration department.
B. The process of verifying an official letter happens when a certain party needs a specific letter that was previously issued. This includes the following stages: a) Submitting a request to the administration department to obtain a copy of a specific official letter. b) Searching for the requested letter by an administrative department employee, depending on the document number and date or on the subject and content of the document. c) If the document exists, copying and providing it to the party that requested it. Here, it is possible of documents being counterfeited and content changed because the sharing process of these documents is not subject to control or tracking after issuing multiple copies. In addition, there is the possibility of losing these documents due to weaknesses in the archiving system. Therefore, using blockchain technology has been suggested to issue, document, and control the sharing of official letters in governmental institutions.

Blockchain-Based System Evaluation Methods
Nowadays, many applications in various fields are implemented on the base of blockchain technology. The performance of these application depends on many factors, such as application criteria, size of the data, types of algorithms used within blockchain, and the type of blockchain. Therefore, it is difficult to determine a uniform measure for the quality of the blockchain-based application.
Most applications use the number of transactions per second to demonstrate the speed of transactions processing within application. Table. 1, shows some examples of numbers of transactions per second, and later, in the results section, these values will be compared with the same measurement for the proposed system 24 .

The Proposed Framework for Blockchain-Based Official Letter Management
In the previous section, the tasks of official letter management in governmental institutions was explained. This section describes the proposed framework to do the same tasks in an e-government environment based on blockchain technology. The name of the proposed system will be abbreviated as FBCOLM. The blockchain-based framework considers two tasks: Issuing official letters and verification of official letters. 1. Issuing official letters: This task represents issuing official letters using blockchain technology. Fig. 2, shows that the framework of this task includes typing the letter by the client, the director of the institution as an endorser, and the employees of the administration department serving as the orderer and the committer. Additionally, the system includes a portal as a frontend for the system that is used to upload the typed letter. 2. Verification of an official letter: The second task in FBCOLM is to verify the validity of an official letter. If clients of the framework have been shared and would later like to verify the validity of the letter, then they must send a verification request for the letter. The portal of the framework receives the request and begins the verification task. If the letter exists in the blockchain, the client will receive a message verifying the validity of the letter; otherwise, the portal returns an invalid message. The verification task uses the hash value of the letter and makes a comparison with the Merkle Tree of the blocks within the ledger. The framework of the verification task is shown in Fig. 3.

Figure. 3:Verification task framework
Issuing an official letter represents adding a new and trusted official letter to the ledger. Adding this letter requires first applying it as a transaction. Also, the verification task depends mainly on finding a matching hash value for the official letter that requires verification. Both services start with creating a transaction; the transaction of issuing a letter includes the letter itself, while the transaction of verification includes a hash value.
Algorithm. 1, creates a list of hash values of all the arrived transactions, and these transactions are added to an array of structure of type issue_transaction. structure issue_transaction { letter: string; client_email: string; issuing_date: date; issuing_time: time; } Email, issuing_date, and issuing_time are included in the data part of the block when adding to the ledger. Only the letter field is used to create a hash value to help verify the letter as shown in Algorithm 1.

Blockchain Information and Testing Data in FBCOLM
The implementation and testing of blockchain-based applications requires deciding on the types of information fields within the block. In FBCOLM, the block is implemented as a structure that consists of the following fields of information:   Fig. 4. The system has been tested using a collection of English language official letters collected from the Internet 25 . The collected letters about 10 letters are of the form shown in Fig. 4. Each of these letters has a size up to 100 KB, which represents the data part of the blocks. These letters are used to test the work of the Merkle tree implementation and the process of a letter verification. Then a code program to generate random text that helps to measure the bandwidth of

Results and Discussion:
The practical part of the proposed blockchain administration services has been implemented using TCP Socket programming using Java language to provide official letter archiving and management. The system has been tested using the dataset mentioned in the block information in the FBCOLM section. The processes for verification and receipt of new documents were tested. In Fig. 5, the simulation program was tested using up to 1,000 client requests for verifications, starting from 50, 100, 200, …, 1,000 and the time in milliseconds required to process the requests, including one of the official letters in the collected dataset. The time required to complete verifications steadily increases as the number of requested verifications increases because each verification in the blockchain takes time to search for the matched hash value and requires the consent of all blockchain members in order to return the correct feedback to the clients. The time complexity of searching in Merkle tree is O(n), where n is the number of nodes in the tree. Therefore, the time for verification will increase linearly as the size of Merkle tree increases. According to the results shown in Fig. 5, the throughput of FBCOLM is 25 transactions per second. The comparison of the result of FBCOLM with some popular blockchain-based applications in Table 1 shows that the throughput of FBCOLM is accepted. The comparison result is shown in Fig. 6.    The above-mentioned experiments and results prove that FBCOLM is characterized by following:  High throughput: The system can process up to 200 transactions in 50 seconds, which means high throughput because there is no third party that the throughput of the system is depends on. All the services are accomplished in multiple nodes and in a distributed way.  Scalability: The system is scalable that new nodes may be added to participate in the peerto peer network.  Transparency: The work is distributed to multiple nodes and none of these nodes can do the whole work alone. FBCOLM was implemented on a network consisting of one instance of nodes for each role. This means only one portal node, orderer node, endorser node, and committer node were considered. Blockchain systems allow for an unlimited number of nodes. The challenge is to make them all participate in a distributed ledger.

Conclusion:
Building an e-government framework has typically been a difficult task because it necessitates the sharing of sensitive and private information; however, blockchain technology aids in the development of e-government systems that promote government openness while also increasing citizen interactivity. To offer verified and controlled official letter sharing, this article suggests implementing blockchain technology to issue official letters and verify them in administrative departments operations in e-government environments.
The suggested framework, FBCOLM, has been tested with various transactions to determine the time required to respond to queries. The results show that the throughput of FBCOLM is within the average range of some famous blockchain-based applications mentioned in Table. 1. Furthermore, the portal response time was tested under various densities of requests. The response delay was less than seven seconds when about 1,000 requests arrived simultaneously.
Furthermore, the proposed system was tested when there were multiple nodes participating, each one with a different role and sharing the workload of providing services.
Finally, as a suggestion for future work, adding multiple nodes for each role and testing the blockchain-based e-government services may be considered. Also, increasing the services provided by the system will be implemented as future work on the FBCOLM.