Standards Australia, Australia’s peak Standards body, has fast-tracked work on standards critical to the
implementation of a Public Key Authentication Framework (PKAF) for secure
electronic commerce.
The organisation released for public comment drafts of the first two
PKAF-related Standards being proposed, and comments will close at the end of
this month.
The drafts are believed to be the first proposed Standards of their kind in
the world.
One, DR 98410, proposes a profile for X.509 digital certificate and
Certificate Revocation Lists required for the validation and authentication
of users engaged in online business transactions.
The other, DR 98411, proposes a set of hash, digital signature, encryption
and key-exchange algorithms and the format for the keys these algorithms
used in public/private key authentication processes.
The documents underpin Standards Australia’s PKAF strategy for the
operation of a national infrastructure supporting digital signatures, which
will be used to verify the integrity of the transactions and guarantee
authenticity of the parties engaged in online electronic business.
The strategy is critical to the Project Gatekeeper framework for public key
authentication, which was launched by the Australian Federal Government in
May this year.