In today's world, more and more businesses are going online not just to increase outreach to their customers but also to provide them more services at their door step. However, this easy access on the Internet is also carrying security threats for businesses which should be addressed with proper security arrangements.
To secure their digital world, NIFT in Pakistan, is providing strong authentication and information security solutions based on PKI and OTP based technologies. In the age of e?business (e?banking, e?filing, e?tendering etc), strong authentication provides crucial online identity and security to help establish trust between parties involved in online transactions over digital networks. Regardless of whether business takes place in the digital world or in the physical world, the parties involved must be able to answer these questions:
-- Who are you? (Requirement of identity).
-- To what community do you belong to? Are you a trusted member? (Trust by association).
-- How can you prove your identity? (Validation of identity).
-- NIFT provides solutions (Authentication, Encryption, and SSL) which not only ensures trust among parties involved in electronic communication but also provides security for it. It is the responsibility of the business to provide its customers assurance that the Web site with which they are communicating is genuine and that the information they send via Web browsers stays private and confidential.
NIFT digital certificate solutions are mainly divided into two broad categories:
1- SSL for Website Authentication and Tunnel encryption.
2- Individual Authentication and Non?repudiation.
-- SSL for Website Authentication and Tunnel Encryption.
Some digital certificates are authenticated trusted authorities, but unfortunately there are CAs that provide unauthenticated SSL Certificates. This practice exposes online users to the risks of false online businesses operating on the Internet. As the leading provider of trust services, NIFT provides SSL (Regular SSL, Extended Validation (EV) SSL) issued from globally trusted CA VeriSign which provides authenticated SSL Certificates that secure the trust relationship between you and your clients. VeriSign assures trust by coupling its authentication service with state?of?the?art encryption technology in its digital certificate solutions.
Individual Authentication and Non-repudiation A digital certificate is an electronic file that uniquely identifies individuals on the Internet and enables secure, confidential communications. Digital certificates serve as a kind of digital passport or credential. NIFT offers Class 2 digital certificate for individual authentication and non? repudiation.
Currently, many online businesses in Pakistan are benefiting from this technology and NIFT itself is benefiting from this technology by allowing banks and other parties to communicate securely online using authenticated SSL and individual digital certificates. However, there are few road blocks to the wide adoption of PKI technology which I consider worth mentioning here with their solutions.
1- Awareness
a. This would be a fallacious statement to say that market lacks awareness about PKI technology. Rather NIFT takes the credit that it has created a lot of awareness about this technology and organisations have really started recognising the worth of this technology. Having said that, many professionals in our market still fear this technology because of the surface knowledge they carry about this technology.
One more reason is that we haven't yet developed some good number of services for the general public whereby they ought to use PKI technology and get used to it. Many Asian countries like Taiwan, Singapore has started offering services to general public where they have mandated the use of PKI technology and people are using those services.
2- Expensive Technology
a. Again it's a wrong perception that PKI is an expensive technology and does not offer a meaningful ROI to businesses. If it had been the case, developed countries would have stopped using it even for purposes as small as signing a wedding contract.
3- User Friendliness
a. One of the biggest obstacles for PKI adoption is user friendliness. NIFT offers several options (eg Smartcards) in this regard to give its customer maximum flexibility according to their needs and requirements. Moving one step forward, NIFT has taken a major leap to address this problem on a permanent basis by introducing Mobile based PKI services.
Currently going through its pilot testing phase, NIFT shall soon start offering this service and hence users would no more be required to carry any additional hardware for certificates. User mobile phones would act as his/her digital identity.
With aforementioned obstacles, the trade-off between security and user friendliness must be taken into proper consideration when introducing new and safer means of authentication such as Mobile PKI or any other out of band authentication mechanism (eg NIFT Authentication Service).
Though these new approaches offer higher level of security and user friendliness but there has to be a criterion based on level of security, number of users, pricing & collaboration among stakeholders for adopting them in the short term.
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