secunet was engaged by the BA to develop a flexible, future-proof PKI that will also meet future legal and technical requirements. In this role, secunet’s PKI experts rigorously selected open, manufacturer-independent and standards-compliant technologies for all the new infrastructure components, which also fully comply with the German Digital Signature Act.
Updating the infrastructure led to a significant reduction in software diversity, as well as the need for fewer service components. Besides simplifying the system for users, this has resulted in lower support and administration costs, among other things.
“I’d especially like to highlight our excellent cooperation with the German Federal Labour Office. Together, we have completely redeveloped one of Germany’s largest PKI installations for qualified certificates and effected a seamless transition from the old system to the new one,” explains Dr Rainer Baumgart, Chairman of the Board at secunet. “The project benefited from the experience we’ve gained completing over 250 PKI projects in the past 15 years.”
With the new PKI, digital service cards will be created and administered for more than 120,000 employees of the BA and joint establishments. The service cards are multifunctional and will be used for logging on to BA workstations and applications via single sign-on, for instance. In addition, employees will be able to use their cards to sign documents and encrypt/decrypt emails. The cards can also be used for building access control and recording working hours.
secunet has supported its customers for a number of years in the implementation of individual public key infrastructures, and was heavily involved in the development of all certificate authorities accredited pursuant to the German Digital Signature Act – from Germany’s first trust centre, through the development of the highly available mass signature solution secunet multisign, to the implementation of the BA’s PKI.
press releases
The German Federal Labour Office Invests in a New PKI from secunet
[Essen, 15 December 2014] secunet has designed, developed and launched a new public key infrastructure (PKI) for qualified certificates on behalf of the German Federal Labour Office (BA). In doing so, a particular challenge was the seamless migration of inventory data from the legacy system to the new environment in full compliance with the German Digital Signature Act. The project was completed in just under three years without the need to interrupt the service at any time, and the new PKI has now been fully integrated into standard operations.
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