The DTI's public consultation paper, 'Licensing of Trusted Third Parties for the Provision of Encryption Services', released in March, says that organisations should buy encryption services for their electronic commerce from these third parties, which will be licensed by the Government. The paper has caused concern among IT companies - including the providers of encryption software. They fear that civil liberties, companies' commercial secrets and electronic commerce as a whole will be put at risk by legislation. It developed software to provide security features for computer networks. It took SSE six months and less than L500,000 to develop TrustedWeb, which started its beta programme in April.
Intranets contain sensitive and confidential data.
At the moment, access to those intranets is controlled by who users are. When you are talking about a thousand-plus users, that is impossible to control,' explains Brady. With TrustedWeb, identification is based on users' functions and information requirements. The data is stored on the security server and access is granted to individual users according to this data. It is TrustedWeb's 128-bit encryption key that has raised government concerns over the potential ability of criminals and foreign military powers to send data in unbreakable code across the Internet.