P1001

PKI Implementation and Test Suites for Selected Applications and Services

closed

A number of EURESCOM Projects in the past have addressed the importance of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that needs to be integrated in different technologies, applications and services. Requirements for trials and interoperability testing for selected applications that can benefit from the use of PKI have been specified. A PKI framework has been defined as well. Several EURESCOM Projects of the WP2000 have unidentified PKI requirements that need to be considered.

PKI has a definitive role  for providing trustworthy over the Internet. Applications, services and technologies utilising certificates will have an important position in the future e-commerce infrastructure.

Telcos are involved in PKI based security services studies because :

• Telcos need to protect their own information system and databases (like ordinary companies)
• Telcos need to communicate with partners and other Telcos in a very secure way.
• Telcos want to provide global seamless security services for their customers.

Based on these three considerations, the investigation of security services and the investigation of PKI as a basis for specification of all security services (to be offered to customers or to be implemented between Telcos for inter-communication purposes) are nowadays crucial studies for European Telcos.

EURESCOM has significant position in promoting a new security policy framework to Shareholders. In addition to this, EURESCOM should establish heterogeneous Europe-wide infrastructure framework for the PKI architecture enabling trusted services over the network.

Objectives

The objectives of the studies/pilots related to the following major functions of Trusted Services are to identify, define and verify (e.g., for completeness and consistency) operational, technical, regulatory and legal aspects in such detail that the results can be used to assess the effectiveness, economics and acceptability of Trusted Third Party Services.

The purpose of this work is to establish competitive PKI solutions for Telcos and for inter-Telcos applications to govern the use of cryptography for integrity, authentication and confidentiality in Trusted Services, and to determine their respective weights, to resolve the dilemma posed by the increasing importance of encryption in the Pan-European telecommunication infrastructure.

The use of role certificates will bring remarkable opportunities to implement trust worth based solution services and applications.

The main objectives of this Project are to:

• set up trials based on recommendations and requirements from EURESCOM P944 project
• provide a global picture of all the results and conclusions of major certification related studies from EC funded researches, European regulations or directives and standardisation bodies.
• investigate legal issues, regulatory aspects within Europe (i.e. CEC), export controls imposed by US, the impact on the effectiveness of security solutions in Europe and the consequences on PKI deployment and on PKI based services/applications implementation.
• identify gaps and interoperability problems
• identify inter-Telco requirements on PKI implementation.
• create complete interoperable PKI model
• perform PKI interoperability testing, compatibility of infrastructure
• identify usability of technology/user interfaces needed to use certification based applications
• specify, test and pilot selected certification based applications recommended by the project P944, e.g., to use digitally signed EURESCOM documents and forms, use of certificates for billing, and
• use of certificates for user authentication
• specify and test certificates for wireless technologies such as WAP-GW, WAP/WTLS and WAP/WML
• implement TTP (Trusted Third Party) services based on ETSI recommendations for UMTS
• Identify the missing processes to make a PKI work in a Mobile IP (v4 and v6) environment and show how can Mobile IP actors (Mobile Node, Home Agent, Foreign Agent) use this PKI to authentify each other.