Certificate Services

Integration of various x509 certificate solutions for secure authentication

Challenges

Many companies and branches of government are facing the prospect of introducing strong authentication to ensure secure internet access to their applications.

In Sweden and other countries many banks and other third party organisations are providing X.509 certificate solutions to their customers. Today these solutions are either based on the X.509 and SSL standard authentication or a proprietary client based method. This means that application software that wants to use these certificate solutions must correctly select the required method depending on the remote users solution.

The Solution

NordicEdge Certificate Services provide a solution to the proliferation of certificate methods, removing this complexity from your infrastructure and applications. This simple module will deal with authentication of users from the many different certificate methods, handle any required self registration in a local user store for authenticated users, and integrate seamlessly with your existing security infrastructure.

Product Overview

NordicEdge Certificate Services consists of four modules, authentication, digital signatures, registration and integration.

Authentication

This module checks that a presented certificate and issuer are valid, a control for validity is also made via a CRL list or OCSP transaction.

Digital Signatures

This module generates and verifies different digital signatures. PKCS#7, S/MIME and XML Digital Signatures are supported through a simple Web Services API or a JAVA API. Verfication can be made internally or by calls to external verification services.

Also available in this module are digest functions for generating message digests, the digests provided by the default installation are: SHA-1,MD-5,RIPE-MD160. Other digests are available on demand.

Registration

This module checks if an authenticated user exists in an applications directory service or SQL database. If the user doesn't exist the module can create the user from information obtained from the users certificate, for example first and last name, and unique identifier (Swedish personal number in some cases).

Integration

Integration with all common authentication systems such as Computer Associates SiteMinder (formally Netegrity) is included in the default distribution. Most standard web servers are supported out of the box, including Apache and Microsoft IIS. Other integrations are available on request for the majority of major products. A custom API is available for integrating with other systems such as in-house developed security layers.

Integration Modules

Technical Data