[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
NIST involvement in PKI
Below is a notice that came to me by a rather circuitous route. Would
people from the mentioned companies care to comment on how they see the
NIST involvement complementing or otherwise affecting the work that's
ongoing here?
--
Bill Buffam
Unisys, Malvern PA
bjb@trsvr.tr.unisys.com
------------------------------------------------------------------
Partners to Agree on PKI Basics
NIST is joining with several companies to take steps toward
developing the elements of a public key infrastructure. This will
make it possible to send and receive digitally signed documents
among organizations and individuals who may never have met. NIST
has established cooperative research and development agreements
with AT&T Government Markets; BBN Corp.; Certicom Corp.; Cylink
Corp.; DynCorp Information & Engineering Technology Inc.;
Information Resource Engineering Inc.; Motorola; Northern Telecom
Ltd. (Nortel); SPYRUS Inc. and VeriSign Inc. The partnerships aim
to develop a minimum interoperability specification sort of a least
common denominator for the technical pieces of a PKI to be publicly
available for organizations to use in building PKI components. By
working with NIST, the companies are helping to ensure that future
PKI components will be able to communicate with each other, much as
today's fax machines can receive transmissions from each other
regardless of brand name or manufacturer. A PKI is necessary to
enable large-scale use of digital signatures and other forms of
public key cryptography by both government and private-sector
users.
Media Contact: Anne Enright Shepherd, (301) 975-4858
anne.shepherd@nist.gov