SPECIAL NOTICE
99 -- Achieving Interoperability with Digital Signature Standards
- Notice Date
- 1/20/2005
- Notice Type
- Special Notice
- Contracting Office
- N00104 NAVICP 5450 Carlisle Pike PO Box 2020 Mechanicsburg, PA
- ZIP Code
- 00000
- Solicitation Number
- DON-SNOTE-050120-005
- Archive Date
- 2/4/2005
- Description
- January 19, 2005 REQUEST FOR INFORMATION Sponsoring Organization: Office of the Department of the Navy Chief Information Officer On behalf of: Department of Defense Digital Signature Interoperability Team Subject: ACHIEVING INTEROPERABILITY WITH DIGITAL SIGNATURES Introduction: This is a request for industry comments synopsis and is not to be construed as a commitment by the Government to issue a request for proposal, award a contract or otherwise pay for information provided in response to this synopsis. This synopsis is for information gathering only and does not restrict the Government as to the ultimate technical policy is may choose to implement or, if applicable the acquisition procedure it may choose to pursue. General Background: Over the last 3-4 years, the Department of Defense has aggressively deployed an identity management system that combines the use of hardware token (e.g. the Common Access Card (CAC)) and public key technologies (e.g. DoD Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)). These components are envisioned to be used to provide non-repudiation and secure authentication to unclassified network and web-based services. The Department has issued over 5 million CACs, installed hundreds of thousands of smart card readers/middleware, and enabled thousands of web sites to utilize public key technology for authentication. However, the linchpin to these initiatives is the ability of the Department?s business owners to re-engineer their business processes to become more efficient and paperless by using CAC, PKI, and digital signatures. Problem Statement: To fully leverage the use of digital signatures across the Department of Defense, it is necessary that digitally signed transactions can be shared with different areas of the Department that very likely will have different desktop configurations. It has become apparent that current implementations do not provide this flexibility. Vendor implementations of industry leading digital signature standards (Public Key Cryptography Standard (PKCS) #7 and Extensible Markup Language Digital Signature (XML Dsig)) appear to be not interoperable within each standard. To alleviate this concern, a small team of subject matter experts within the DoD has developed implementation guidance (i.e. profiles) of these standards. This RFI is centered around the attached Draft DoD Profiles for PKCS #7 and XML Dsig. It is our intent to require all applicable desktop applications (e.g. mostly web-browsing and document processing applications) to implement PKCS #7 and XML Dsig in accordance with these profiles for all future and potentially current product releases. It will be used to digitally sign documents, electronic forms, and web objects. Specific Questions: Please review the attached draft Profiles and provide any recommendations as desired. Additionally, if each respondent can address the following specific questions, it would be greatly appreciated. 1. In your opinion, would these profiles cultivate interoperability as outlined in the problem statement? Do you have any suggestions on how to improve these profiles? 2. In your opinion, are there any viable alternatives to providing implementation guidance (i.e. profiles)? 3. What are your current and future planned implementations? Do they address the concerns expressed in the problem statement? Would they meet the requirements outlined in the implementation profiles? Submissions: General comments and questions regarding this RFI shall be directed to Mr. Bill Huber, Contracting Officer, at William.huber@navy.mil or (717) 605-3210. Specific technical comments and questions should be directed to Mr. Jonathan Baldwin, DoN CIO, at jonathan.Baldwin@navy.mil. Please provide all responses via e-mail to jonathan.baldwin@navy.mil. by COB 03 February 2005
- Record
- SN00737729-W 20050122/050120212219 (fbodaily.com)
- Source
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