Following its final design meeting at Oracle Corp last week, the World Wide Web Consortium’s Digital Signature Initiative team is now beginning to write reference implementations of its digital signature model, called DSig. The likes of IBM Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc, Microsoft Corp and Netscape Communications Corp had been working under the auspices of the Consortium for the last few months to design a specification, based on the existing PICS Platform for Internet Content Selection 1.1 technology, that attaches meaningful statements to various kinds of digital signatures. Vendors will be able to use the DSig model to plug in statements like this applet has been tested and approved to go through the firewall to whatever existing digital signatures they may want to use. Reference implementations of DSig are expected to be available to W3C members this summer, with general public availability coming a month later.
