The Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE) is all set to provide technical assistance to government offices in the state to install Digital Signature in Free Software based Operating System.

KITE has come-up with a system for integrating Digital Signatures in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) based Operating Systems which is used in most government offices, a release by K Anvar Sadath, Vice Chairman and Executive Director of KITE, said.

The state government had recently instructed all government offices to compulsorily make use of Digital Signatures for preparing salaries and other benefits of employees in SPARK (Service and Payroll Administrative Repository for Kerala) portal.

“At present, 27,797 government offices in the State use SPARK portal for salary disbursement for over seven lakh employees. The new mechanism devised by KITE comes in the backdrop of reports of some offices, including some from General Education Department, depending proprietary software for this purpose,” the release said.

The prevailing state government policy mandates use of only FOSS applications in all its offices.

The IT@School GNU/Linux 18.04 Operating System, developed by KITE already has inbuilt software utilities required for running the drivers for the Digital Signature token devices, which is based on Java.

“The specific installation script, user guide and video tutorials would be made available in the website of KITE www.Kite.Kerala.Gov.In from August 2 onwards,” Sadath said.