Verisign Inc believes it can start to drive adoption of Public Key Infrastructure initiatives in government with the launch today of an on-premise PKI platform it reckons will bring security, reliability and scale to prospective national schemes.
“We’ve been doing PKI for as long as we can remember” said Phil D’Angio, director of business development at VeriSign, “but what’s changed over the last few years is that a real appetite has developed among governments who are wanting to have their own PKI capability. We’re simply answering their call.”
Today the company took the wraps off the VeriSign PKI Platform, an in-premise offering for national PKI schemes that has been modelled on the same architecture that has long been deployed as a managed service.
The company said that governments can choose to manage their own PKI digital certificates, and can opt for strong authentication using smart cards across all major Web browsers and platforms.
D’Angio said there were some great areas of success for governments to use PKI to identify individuals in a managed capacity, with Verisign helping them scale up their programmes into national PKI initiatives. “Identifying individuals with certification, programmes around e-passports, and smartcard-based national identity cards are only the start” he noted.
“We have started to help build a value proposition with governments and want to help build lots of use cases that demonstrate how they can use PKI to connect with business, adapting the technology to manage identities in applications from e-commerce and healthcare, to chat rooms.”
The company said that its PKI Platform gives governments a way to offer citizens fast and easy access to e-services such as health and welfare programs, e-passports, and national ID programs. “PKI plays a critical role in e-government by allowing countries to leverage authentication, encryption, and digital signature technologies when issuing identity certificates, business certificates, and device certificates” it said.
D’Angio explained that the new platform had already been deployed by the Greek Ministry of Interior to authenticate citizens and secure certain electronic transactions, and also helps underpin a tax card issued by Receita Federal Brazil to secure web-based income tax submissions.
Another case of it being used in Germany is also about to be announced.
In Greece the company collaborated with Adacom SA, one of its affiliates in the region, and D’Angio confirmed that Verisign expects to continue working with its local partners on future PKI Platform implementations.
