Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. This suggests the use of digital signatures for data access. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. This requires the existence of digital credentials for access and privacy protection in, for example, student records. Since individual certificates generally expire within 2 months, there is not a major issue if the identity of the certificate authority changes due to mergers or other business changes.
Certificates can provide very flexible interaction with a server.
Both encryption and certification can act seamlessly within browser programs, such as mailers and retrieval forms. The Amelia system will deliver information to any machine in the .ua.edu domain. More of us will be encrypting email, as more and more transactions occur in this way. Indeed, we should probably be moving faster here, since spoofing an email address is not particularly difficult and there have already been a few horror stories when students fake a professor's address and distribute messages that can cause all manner of trouble. Digital certificates will probably replace student ID and PIN for accessing university services, since this provides what is becoming a universally supported access-control and authentication protocol.