PKI for UA

The University of Alabama
Becoming a Digital campus

 
  • Imagine being able to submit a signed form or signed homework without having to walk across campus or wait for it to go through campus mail.

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  • Imagine being able to know that the piece of email you just got from the dean of A&S really came from the dean of A&S.

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  • Imagine being able use restricted campus resources, such as electronic library journals, through any ISP of your choice.
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    The internet community is now moving very quickly to establish trust models. These are designed to ensure that the person on the other end of an internet transaction, be it email, a legal agreement, or a request to use a resource such as the library, is who they say they are. This trust technique uses a digital certificate, with which email or documents can be "signed", or, on the basis of which, the individual can be looked up in a directory. Individuals have already had a limited set of this capability to a certain degree through the personal use of signatures, such as PGP. Using PGP as an example, a user can sign an email message with their private PGP key and the recipient has to be prepared to look up the PGP user in a distant key server in order to authenticate the message. In this case, the recipient has to trust that the sender was honest about his or her identity when he or she applied for the PGP key. 

    The University of Alabama campus is now in the first stages of moving in the direction of implementing digital signature ability. There are growing needs for digital signing and use-of-resource authorization. We are working on proof-of-concept within the University working environment. So, watch for PKI coming to a computer near you. 

    What is PKI? - a little information from Netscape

    Where do we go from here?

    Site last updated on: Wednesday, 20-Jun-2001

    Visitors since June 20, 2001:  5429