Partnership agreed

Digital certificates are playing an increasingly important role in the implementation of high IT security. More and more companies are implementing their own public key infrastructure (PKI) to support secure two-factor authentication or the encryption of business-critical data, such as HID Global writes. However, if certificates are to be applicable beyond company boundaries (e.g., exchange of encrypted e-mails, digital signing), a local PKI would be overwhelmed by this. For such purposes, the certificate provider SwissSign, a Swiss Post company, provides know-how and infrastructure.

HID, which is active in the field of secure identities and access control, and SwissSign are entering into a partnership for the countries Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The combination of SwissSign's certificates with HID's Card Management System (CMS) creates an end-to-end and reliable solution when it comes to authentication in the context of cross-company communication, the two vendors let it be known. When smart cards are issued, SwissSign's certificate services would be integrated just as transparently as a company's own PKI. The CMS would then generate certificates from both the local certification authority and SwissSign, store them on the smartcard and manage them securely from a central location.