Although S/MIME has its uses, WebSigning (signing web forms), is already a much more significant tool for many e-governments. This is mostly due to the fact that interactive services are considerably more flexible than static e-mail, but it also depends on the ease of establishing confidentiality (https).
However, there is a fly in the soup. There is no standard for WebSigning, making this facility costly to deploy as well as non-interoperable. Recently a number of leading pharmaceutical companies who have formed a strong authentication consortium (SAFE), launched an internally developed standard known as USSI (Universal SAFE Signing Interface). But similar WebSigning "standards" have also been launched by: - The Swedish government - The Austrian government - The Norwegian government - The Danish government - The Estonian government - The Hongkong government - The DoD - Dozens of independent software vendors Somewhat surprising, the people who seem to be the least aware of these efforts to transform the ubiquitous Internet browser from being a "Universal Thin Client", to become a "Universal PKI-enabled Thin Client" are actually the browser vendors and W3C! Comments? Anders Rundgren Disclaimer: The views expressed in this message are solely the author's and should not be attributed to his employer or their clients _______________________________________________ mozilla-crypto mailing list mozilla-crypto@mozilla.org http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-crypto
