OASIS Tees Up Digital Signatures, Time Stamping

By Richard Karpinski

The OASIS standards group Thursday formed a new technical committee to develop XML protocols for digital signatures and cryptographic time stamping in a Web services transaction.

OASIS has become a font of XML standards, housing specs ranging from ebXML to WS-Security to SAML.

Their latest work, somewhat surprisingly, appears to overlap work being done at the W3C on XML digital signatures. However, the W3C's work is on baseline XML standards such as XML Signatures and XML Encryption, both of which will ultimately play a role in the new OASIS standards, according to Karl Best, director of technical operations for OASIS.

The OASIS digital signature standard will be more application-oriented and focus specifically on the use of the technology within a Web services context, the group said.

Vendors participating in the new technical committee include Entrust, IONA, NIST, webMethods, TIBCO, Verisign, and others.

Specifically, the work of the new OASIS Digital Signature Services Technical Committee will enable Web services to produce and verify digital signatures and provide techniques for proving that a given signature was created within its private key validity period.

Delivering not just a digital signature but one with an accurate time stamp will be an important security provision in machine-to-machine Web services transactions.