GTE CyberTrust, the public key infrastructure and certification authority division of GTE Corp has licensed the digital certification validation software and services from ValiCert Inc. It means CyberTrust will integrate the ValiCert software with its certification authority products and resell the ValiCert Enterprise Server. ValiCert enables users to test digital certificates before use to ensure that they are still valid. It has partnered with all the major certification authority companies, including GTE, Entrust, IBM, Integrion, MCI, Thawte and VeriSign, among others to provide what VP marketing Sathvik Krishnamurthy calls a trust backbone. Those certification authorities provide ValiCert with lists of revoked certificates for it to check against. Its value-add in this area is its independence. ValiCert also sells its development kit direct to companies such as Worldtalk. Intel Corp – an investor in privately-held ValiCert – also distributes the toolkit. Krishnamurthy, who left Worldtalk to join ValiCert says there will be three of four more licensees of the development kit in the next few weeks. Through its tie-in with Intel, ValiCert has added support for the Common Data Security Architecture (CDSA), which was originally developed at Intel. Krishnamurthy says the company favors it because it runs on both Unix and NT. However, it is looking for somebody to lead the development of the next version of its development kit, which is expected to support Microsoft’s CryptoAPI as well. Krishnamurthy says CryptoAPI will probably get a lot of market share in time. The ValiCert certification validation services and enterprise server are available now from GTE CyberTrust.
