UK Ministry of Defence Standardizes on Entrust PKI

Entrust’s technology selected to be the foundation for the MoD’s PKI ecosystem

11 Oct 2006

DALLAS - In an effort to enforce their strategy of centrally controlling policy to maintain a trusted network environment, the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence (MoD) sought a public key infrastructure (PKI) solution to manage authentication, digital signatures and encryption capabilities. Entrust, Inc. [NASDAQ: ENTU] proudly announces that the company has licensed its Entrust Authority™ Security Manager to the the UK's MoD where it is to be used as the MoD root certification authority (Root CA).

"The functionality and comprehensive nature of Entrust's PKI solution definitely meets our need to seamlessly manage the different capabilities we need for our secure network environment," said Lieutenant Colonel Keith Bell, Head of Defence Interoperable Network Services Authority. "We now have fully deployed the root certificate authority (CA) technology and look forward to extending this chain of trust to all departments and business partners."

Entrust Authority™ Security Manager, a world-leading PKI, is designed to manage the digital keys and certificates that make up the digital identities used to transparently automate security-related processes in an organization. As an organization's Certification Authority (CA) system, Entrust Authority Security Manager software can help enable the use of digital signature, digital receipt, encryption and permissions management services across a wide variety of applications and solutions.

"Having a secure PKI infrastructure is at the heart of building a trusted network environment," said Entrust Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Bill Conner. "Because the MoD has to service a variety of different internal agencies, it is important that their PKI offers security and functionality to support this vast network. We are pleased to help them in their quest to securely communicate with both internal constituencies, as well as extend this security network to Defence contractors and other outside parties."

The MoD will use the Entrust Authority Security Manager to support authentication, digital signatures and encryption. The PKI system also will allow the issuance of digital credentials to internal devices, as well as provide security for collaboration with industry partners. In addition, the PKI system will provide a root CA to the Defence Information Infrastructure DII(F) that will help create a single, efficient information infrastructure within the MoD.