On Thu, 19 Jun 1997, George Pitcher wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've been reading Andrew Young's paper on JANET Authorisation and Encryption
> services (http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/jisc/acn/authent/young.html). I can
> see this service adding a much-needed layer of security for those operating eLib
> services (such as SCOPE).
...
> 3. Will a WWW compliant system be up and running (completely) soon or
is there a
> bit of pilot testing to do?
>
Hi George
The report does say "World Wide Web services are specifically excluded
from this report."
Developments in the web area are being coordinated by the W3C DSig
(Digital Signatures) Initiative. This initiative covers both digital
signatures (this web resources really does come from the University of
Bath, which is an authenticated University) and assertions about the
resource (this is a non-repudiable, legally binding statement
regarding, say courses available at Bath University). The model can be
applied to binary resources (e.g. ActiveX and Java applets) and can cover
technical (machine readable?) assertions ("this ActiveX component is
guaranteed not to contain a trojan horse" or "this Java applet will run
on a 16Mb PC running Windows 95).
Digital signatures will be stored using PICS/NG (probably) which will
use XML (probably). I say probably as the W3C recommendations will have
to be agreed by W3C member organisations.
It's not clear to me if anyone in the UK is looking at implementing a
DSig solution - I will try and find out.
Brian
------------------------------------------------------
Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus
UKOLN, University of Bath, BATH, England, BA2 7AY
Email: [log in to unmask] URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
Phone: 01225 323943 FAX: 01225 826838
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