DNV has launched a trust anchor for e-Business – the validation authority solution for verification of digital signatures and validation of digital certificates.
The Validation Authority provides customers with one-stop-shopping for validation of digital certificates and verification of digital signatures: One point of trust, one agreement one point of billing, one technical integration and one point of communication.
Establishing trust
The challenge in the accelerating drive towards international e-business is to establish trust between the communicating parties. An important issue is how that trust can be readily and securely extended beyond the boundaries of their own trusted community,” says business development manager in DNV Industry Leif Buene.
Public key cryptography used with a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) can meet this challenge. However, it is required that interoperability can be established between the various PKI domains as represented by a larger number of certificate authorities.
Solving interoperability
Rather than trying to solve interoperability through trust structures amongst certificate authorities. DNV introduces an independent validation authority that replaces the certificate authorities as the trust anchor for the customer, as opposed to present PKI theory and practice, where only a certifcate authority may be trusted.
“As far as we know DNV is so far the only company offering this on a global basis,” continues Leif Buene.
Market potential
The DNV solution enables customers to receive and verify digitally signed documents and data from in principle anyone, making it attractive for international business transactions. Such a solution is needed by any internationally oriented organisation that wants to make use of digital signatures to improve their work flow processes. The market potential for the validation authority service, although dependent on the implementation of digital signature technology, is large.
Partnering with Ascertia Limited
DNV is partnering with Ascertia Ltd. to provide key elements of the validation authority technology. Ascertia is based in United Kingdom and has several years of experience with digital signatures and certificates. They offer a wide range of signature generation, verification, certificate validation, time-stamping and encryption products and services for transactions and documents.
The trust anchor DNV Validation Authority was launched at the Infosecurity ’07 conference in London.