Entegrity tools for digital certs
The company announces a series of new tools and partnerships to make it easier to use digital certificates in enterprise applications.
Entegrity's Security Development Platform (SDP) provides a framework for enterprise developers to incorporate digital IDs, which serve as electronic identity cards online, from different issuers into a variety of applications. In addition to the new release of SDP, Entegrity also upgraded its Notary and AssureWeb software and unveiled two new offerings, AssureMail and Entegrity-SSL.
"Now that you have a digital certificate, what do you do with it?" John Weinschenk, vice president of worldwide marketing for Entegrity Solutions, asked rhetorically. "Not a lot of applications are enabled for digital certificates. The challenge is, how easy is it to integrate those certificates into applications? How much choice do you have for interoperability?"
Entegrity's tools are designed for integrating security products from different vendors into a single framework.
The company also announced strategic partnerships with certificate authorities (CAs) and vendors of certificate software, including VeriSign, ValiCert, Who? Vision Systems, Entrust Technologies, and Data Connection Limited.
"In the past, you had to buy toolkits from multiple vendors, then spend nine months to integrate the products. With our platform, you can do that in weeks or days," Weinschenk said.
Individual vendors offer tools to use their digital certificates in applications; Entrust, which recently filed an IPO, has an "Entrust ready" program. But vendors aren't likely to create tools to integrate their competitors' certificates into applications.
A number of vendors, but not VeriSign, have announced plans to "cross-certify" their certificates, meaning that certificates issued by one company could be utilized by another firm.
Entegrity's SDP is a modular infrastructure for creating security-enhanced applications or adding security to existing client-server applications. It also can be used to create applications that incorporate a full public key infrastructure, strong encryption, user authentication, and secure document handling. It supports RSA encryption, Diffie-Hellman certificates, and symmetric algorithms.
Among Entegrity's other offerings, Notary is a $5,000 certificate management system, on Windows NT and Solaris, that lets users create, sign, distribute, verify, revoke, and use digital certificates. AssureWeb equips businesses to conduct e-commerce and use internal and business-to-business applications over the Web by controlling access to sensitive data.
AssureMail, a new product, lets enterprises use various secure email and file encryption packages that support SMTP and MAPI seamlessly, including Exchange, Outlook, Eudora, Lotus Notes, and Netscape.
The other new product, Entegrity-SSL, serves as a secure platform for Web commerce applications.
Entegrity also announced initial users of its software, including America Online, Bell Atlantic Internetworking & Multimedia Solutions, systems integrator EDS U.K., and French cash-management start-up CashWare.
Entegrity SDP, AssureWeb, and Notary are currently available, and by October AssureMail and Entegrity-SSL will be too. SDP can be licensed for a one-time fee of $50,000 for 100 users and can be used to secure unlimited applications. Notary starts at $5,000 for 100 certificates, with additional certs starting at $6 each.
Entegrity also offers two packaged pilot product offerings, starting at $40,000.