Global trust anchor for international eBusiness

In order to underpin the use of digital signatures, considerable trust is required in the identity of the communicating parties. Mechanisms must be available to enable businesses to readily and securely extend their communications beyond the boundaries of their own trusted community. 

Success in eBusiness requires secure and legally acceptable ways to replace handwritten signatures with digital signatures based on electronic identities (eIDs). While eIDs themselves can be provided by the Certificate Authorities (CAs) the underlying levels of trust varies. Consequently an independent, objective and acceptable way must be found to compare the trust levels of eIDs. This would especially be useful for international organizations, operating online worldwide. International organizations and governments need innovative and acceptable ways to make eIDs from different countries work together.

A new approach has now been made available to the market as a service from Det Norske Veritas (DNV). DNV is the world’s leading provider of Risk Management and Certification Services. With more than 140 years of global experience in certification services, DNV is now taking the role as a global Validation Authority (VA) to offer independent verification and validation services for international eBusiness. This allows international organizations to make effective use of eIDs and digital signatures and to harness the power of existing eIDs issued worldwide.

The DNV VA service is neutral with respect to the issuers of the eIDs and helps open up the existing closed CA-trust communities, comprising end users and relying parties (eService providers and receivers of digitally signed documents) having agreement with the CA. The DNV VA service first and foremost creates value for the Relying Party by providing a “one-stop” global solution for verification of digital signatures and validation of various eIDs that the end users might use towards the Relying Party. Moreover, significant value is created for the CAs as issued certificates can be used by CA’s end users in much wider markets (towards relying parties that may not even have agreement with the CA). This brings additional revenues and greater market exposure to the CAs.
In order to offer the VA service to the global organizations, DNV needed a managed service partner who could assure highest levels of service quality. DNV selected BBS (Banking and Business Solutions) to establish and operate the VA service for international organizations.  BBS is ensuring cost effective availability of high quality VA service from DNV. BBS was chosen due to being one of the leading European information security environments.

The DNV Validation Authority service will enable effective use of eID and digital signatures for securing electronic business processes, offering to:

• process eIDs issued by CAs that its customers ask it to work with, in principle any CA
• assess the quality and trustworthiness of the issuing CAs and their eIDs
• verify the signatures of various formats on the transaction or document
• assess the quality of the signatures
• provide time stamping and notary services

About Leif Buene

Leif Buene has worked in DNV (Det Norske Veritas) for 25 years in various positions, mainly within research and innovation. For the last 10 years he has been engaged in innovation projects related to e-Business. He has been responsible for the development of DNV’s Validation Authority solution for verification of digital signatures and validation of electronic IDs. Dr Buene is currently Business Development Manager in DNV Industry, based at DNV’s head office in Oslo, and Business Manager of the DNV Validation Authority services.

About Bishwajit Choudhary

Bishwajit Choudhary is Vice President (Trust Services) at Banking and Business Solutions. He has worked with authentication and signing services since 1999 and is currently based at BBS headquarters in Oslo. Between 2003 and 2006, Mr Choudhary led international task forces on mobile financial services and authentication at the European Committee for Banking Standards (http://www.ecbs.org) and Mobey forum (http://www.mobeyforum.org). He presides on the Editorial Board at Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organizations (USA) and the Technical Committee for International Business Information Management Conference (USA).