Digital signature management

The Digital Signature Project (ELU‐project) is coordinated by the STUZZA, a subsidiary of the leading Austrian business banks. The aim of the project is to establish an infrastructure for applying smart card‐based digital signatures in banking and electronic commerce applications. One important requirement is to conform to all relevant international standards to ensure interoperability in case of a later connection to an international certification infrastructure. One part of the infrastructure is a public directory in the form of an LDAP‐server from which the X.509v3 certificates of the public signature keys can be retrieved. To provide for integrity, strong data authenticity and non‐repudiation of all directory information it was important to apply some security features that have not been standardized for LDAP yet. In this way the user can be sure that he is talking to the trusted directory when retrieving certificates and certificate‐related information. In this paper we give an overview of the project and some insights into some of the interesting parts of the system specification and design.