News

OASIS forms another PKI committee

• By Rich Seeley
• January 8, 2003

Following up on the November announcement that it was taking over the PKI Forum, OASIS announced this week that it has formed a new technical committee to ''advance adoption of the Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) for Web services and other applications.''

The new committee will not be tinkering with the PKI standard itself but will focus on its promotion by producing implementation guidelines, conformances tests and white papers, explained Carol Geyer, director of communications at OASIS.

Addressing issues facing IT professionals seeking to deploy digital certificates, including overcoming technical and integration problems in PKI implementation, is the goal, according to Terry Leahy, chairman of the new committee. The committee will also offer a forum for developers and others working with the standard to exchange information on how to use PKI and digital certificates in Web services and other applications, said Leahy.

Geyer said the documentation the committee develops and the forum will be available on the committee's new Web site at http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/pki/.

Since the November announcement, PKI has been integrated into other OASIS projects involving Web services and security, including Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), the XML Access Control Markup Language (XACML), the Rights Language, the Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML), the XML Common Biometric Format (XCBF) and the Digital Signature Services (DSS) protocol.

Members of the new committee include representatives from Computer Associates, Entrust, KPMG, RSA Security, Sun Microsystems, VeriSign and Wells Fargo, according to the OASIS announcement. The committee is still open to new members; information about joining is available at http://www.oasis-open.org/join.

For more information on the Boston-based OASIS non-profit standards consortium, please go to http://www.oasis-open.org.