Secure Sign
Electronic commerce enhances business efficiencies, enabling electronic data to be stored, accessed or transmitted with great ease. These efficiencies, however, and the dramatic growth of the Internet as a medium for communication, have raised new issues and concerns related to the security of electronic information. For example, when exchanging documents over the Internet, users (both corporate and individual) are concerned by such factors as eavesdropping (information remains intact, but privacy is compromised), tampering (information in transit is changed or replaced) and impersonation (information passes to a person who poses as the intended recipient).
To provide a complete solution, SANAtech has sought to provide solutions for three main areas, namely:
• Secure Identity Management
• Secure Data
• Add value through newly provided security to traditional applications
Secure Sign
Secure Identity Management
SANAtech Secure Sign Solution enables customers to deploy comprehensive identity management security and manage multiple types of identities across heterogeneous, complex environments.
Public Key Infrastructure
The purpose of Public Key Infrastructure is to manage keys and their associated certificates. By the use of encryption, PKI provides confidentiality and access control. By leveraging digital signatures, PKI provides trusted authentication and data integrity. Trusted authentication is whereby users can securely identify themselves to other users or systems without sending private information over the network. Data authentication is provided by message authentication algorithms. This means that the verifier of the digital signature can easily determine if the data has changed in transit.
Secure Data
The fact that electronic data can be easily altered necessitates a system by which parties can trust the information they share and use in everyday transactions. This requirement for trust is referred to in both the legal and crypto-technical worlds as non-repudiation. Non-repudiation is important in e-commerce to prevent parties to a transaction from disputing or denying the transaction after the fact. The primary goal of a non-repudiation system is to prove WHO did WHAT and WHEN, and maintain evidence of such information to resolve disputes, or for auditing and compliance. Non-repudiation should be viewed from both a legal and a technical perspective.
How does SANAtech’s Electronic Mark solution work with PKI?
The core strength of PKI is strong user-level authentication and digital signing (proving WHO did WHAT). SANAtech EM actually extends the trust of PKI by adding trusted time stamps, checking that the signing certificate is not expired, and archiving the transaction for long term non-repudiation. Therefore, SANAtech EM is complementary to PKI, but the user does not need to use PKI in order to use SANAtech EM.
The SANAtech EM is a web-based security service that enables users to verify authenticity, provide tamper detection, and date and timestamp electronic documents and files. Evidence of content authenticity is stored in the SANAtech EM repository for several years to ensure trusted non-repudiation of content.