Position Paper for the XKMS Workshop (July 19, 2001)
Company Information: Ikimbo, Inc.
500 Huntmar Park Drive
Herndon, VA 20170
Attendees: JP Morgenthal, CTO, jpm@ikimbo.com
Bobby Caudill, VP Technology, bcaudill@ikimbo.com
PKI and the Complete Value-Chain
The value-chain is represented by those organizations that act as suppliers, customers, or services to your organization in providing products and/or services. The interesting thing about the value-chain is that it is a dynamic, rapidly-changing, and distributed entity. There are many solutions that could be employed for ensuring security in light of these attributes, but none that has proven so simple and complete as the public key infrastructure.
At Ikimbo, we are developing a real-time platform for accelerating business communications across the value-chain. This is our tag line, but it also accurately details the focus of our products. This means allowing users to leverage the electronic medium that is the Internet and telephony technologies to shorten in duration the time for resolution of business issues. Part of the responsibility that comes associated with this task is ensuring that all the individuals partaking in the communications are authorized users and that their communications are secured and valid. Additionally, this may mean that the data shared throughout this communication includes legally accepted digital signatures to limit reliance upon slower, legacy delivery mechanisms, such as Fax or FedEx.
To Ikimbo, the XKMS initiative provides a standard means for exchanging and managing public/private keys for the demand-chain—an environment that is represented by geographically dispersed, atomically run entities—where each entity may or may not have their own public key infrastructure. The result of this will allow Ikimbo to leverage and create electronic representations of users that can be used across a wide array of applications simplifies access to corporate data, authorization, authentication, secure data on-the-wire and on disk, and legally sign documents for exchange with trading partners.
Because Ikimbo leverages PKI technologies to provide trusted
communications between trading partners, it is our intention to represent our
support as W3C members toward creating an activity focused on these
efforts. Secondly, we would like to
participate in development of the protocols for registration and ensure they
meet the requirements for real-time business communications.