Vision

Standards

Performance Metrics

Government-certified 128-bit encryption; reliable certificate management; ease of use; ease of administration.

Usage and Dependencies

Industry Usage: Leading Certificate Authorities (CA) include Entrust, VeriSign, GTE, etc. These authorities are used by banks and any other organizations for maintaining secure encrypted communications between computers over the Internet using the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). On March 8, 2001, Entrust.net became the world's first Certificate Authority (CA) to be awarded the WebTrust for Certification Authorities (CAs) Seal of Assurance. The WebTrust program was developed jointly by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), and the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) and represents one of the most stringent benchmarks of web site disclosure, security and control that a Public Certification Authority can achieve. The WebTrust for Certification Authorities program includes standards for the issuance of digital certificates so that users of these certificates can feel confident that the certificate is valid, credible and trustworthy. These standards are designed to increase confidence in the security of the public key infrastructure used by Certification Authorities.

SC Usage: The DOE has selected Entrust as the source of certificates for its implementation of a PKI. This will be accomplished as an aspect of the Cybersecurity initiative.

SC Application Impacts: Some SC business applications involve access to sensitive information such as financial transactions and human resources data that requires security at a high technical level.

References

Entrust