Abstract

There are three national, independent consortia in the PASSWORD project: UK, French and German teams of software researchers and developers of OSI security and telematic services. The aim of the project is to pilot a number of OSI applications services with security enhancements. The secured services to be provided are: CCITT X.400(88) Message services, X.500 Directory services, ODA Document services carried over X.400(84) Message services, applications over connection-oriented services, and interworking with Internet Privacy Enhanced Mail. Each consortium has its own implementation of an application-independent security toolkit, and of versions of most of the above telematic services; the facilities we have introduced for securing the applications are outlined in this paper. A common set of security requirements and policies for the applications have been defined. A low-assurance security infrastructure has been deployed by each of the consortia-specific pilot groups; these infrastructures have been shown to interwork to provide a common European authentication infrastructure which respects national boundaries. The various secured application implementations have been shown to interwork. This paper gives the current status of the implementations, with much fuller details on the UK ones. Finally the current and expected piloting activities are discussed. The discussion concentrates on the problems arising in the deployment of the security infrastructure to be used by many applications. Experience from working of the secured application pilots is not yet available.

Author Keywords: security; directory; electronic mail; ODA; OSI Pilot; X.400; X.500; CMIP; PEM; ICR1; ISODE; OSISEC; SECUDE; MAVROS

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