RSA Security Inc. and ValiCert, Inc., announced last week a joint effort to boost trust in e-business transactions by establishing a process for validating digital certificates "as quickly and accurately as validating credit cards." The companies plan to achieve this goal through their Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) Interoperability Initiative, a cooperative endeavor to advance this emerging Internet standard by establishing criteria and performing interoperability testing of third-party OSCP-enabled products to ensure they will work together.
The two companies will combine their security expertise to establish the testing criteria that will be
used to determine OCSP interoperability. Software developers will then be given the opportunity to perform the tests on their OCSP-enabled applications. RSA Security expects to post the test results on its website where organizations building e-business solutions can determine which products have demonstrated interoperability using these tests. The OCSP Interoperability Initiative is modeled after RSA Security's S/MIME Interoperability Center, where over 30 companies have tested their implementations online to ensure secure e-mail interoperability.
More information about the OCSP interoperability initiative is available at
http://www.rsasecurity.com/standards/ocsp
Electronic Bank Drafting Systems has debuted a platform independent version of its traditional automated electronic check payment solution. This newest release of the CHEXpedite service promotes ease of implementation, including a "plug and play" basis for use in many formats, including existing merchant shopping carts or websites, regardless of the integrated platform. Comprehensively, CHEXpedite allows online merchants to offer a real time payment alternative to the traditional paper check and credit card. The process is completed by the debit of the consumer's bank account and the payment transfer into the merchant's account through the ACH via SSL encrypted transactions. Transactions will settle for web merchants within 48 hours, and many times may be completed prior to the shipment of the goods to the consumer. Additionally, re-presentment of any NSF item is handled automatically at no charge to the merchant. CHEXpedite offers increased cash flow to merchants by decreasing payment settlement cycle time, as well as curing the "check is in the mail" dilemma faced by online companies. It also broadens the potential customer base by accommodating the millions of consumers who have no access to credit cards, but do utilize checking accounts.
Ready for some hardcore e-commerce training? You can get it by signing up for "E-Commerce Bootcamp." Produced by Round Table Group, Inc., the international consortium of consulting professors, the series will include eleven one and two-day-long symposia, each featuring a team of the e-commerce industry's most prominent academic thought-leaders, along with keynote speakers from leading firms. Comprised of lectures, panels and informal discussions, and supplemented with on-line content communities, the events are designed for executives and senior managers at established firms who have an urgent need to craft and hone their firm's e-business strategy. For more information, visit http://www.round.table.com.
Celo Communications, a global provider of security products for Internet commerce and communications, and VASCO Data Security International, Inc., a leading provider of strong authentication solutions, recently announced the interoperability between its applications. The integration Celo's e-business security Product, CeloCom Web, and VASCO's DigipassTM family of authentication devices is intended to create a strong security infrastructure ideal for business-to-business e-commerce. To learn more about these products, visit http://www.vasco.com and/or http://www.celocom.com.
In an effort to make digital certificates useful for electronic commerce and virtual private networking (VPN), Cisco Systems, Inc. has announced a free software protocol to better manage the secure delivery of these certificates to network devices and users. Because digital certificates enable a higher level of user access and authentication than network passwords, they are valuable components in Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and will assist in advancing commerce in the Internet economy. The protocol, called the Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP), is one of the first such specifications to be adopted by numerous vendors because it offers a common, consistent method of requesting and receiving (also known as enrolling) digital certificates from different certificate authorities (CAs). Interoperability has been a critical issue inhibiting more widespread adoption of PKI. SCEP removes this significant roadblock by offering an open, scalable, Web-based solution for deploying certificates. It can be beneficial to all network devices and IPSec software solutions, including Cisco Secure Integrated VPN Software and the Cisco Secure PIXTM Firewall. The SCEP specification is publicly available from the Cisco Web site at: http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/cisco/mkt/security/tech/scep_wp.htm
As an extension its Compaq NonStopTM eBusiness solutions strategy, Compaq Computer Corporation has introduced new hardware-based encryption technology. The company's AXL200 Accelerator PCI is designed to hardware dramatically accelerates, by up to 20 times, the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) processing, which is necessary to ensure the privacy and security of transactions. The SSL processing acceleration and the restoration of full server performance enables e-businesses, particularly "e-tailers" and "dot-coms," to continue growing their Internet-based businesses without compromising the security of transactions. Customer support and information about Compaq and its products are available at http://www.compaq.com.