Community

We want the OpenXAdES community to span across many different regions and countries. We hereby openly invite all CA-s, whether national/governmental or commercial, to join our initiative, and everyone else to take a look at the work we have done and help us further our cause and thus also increase your own competitiveness by transition to totally paperless legal communication. See below for more information.

Participating CA-s

• Estonia - AS Sertifitseerimiskeskus (SK) is the maintainter of OpenXAdES and uses the system in providing digital signature infrastructure in Estonia
• Finland - Väestörekisterikeskus (Population Register Centre) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with SK, outlining the cooperation for applying OpenXAdES within and between Finland and Estonia for exchange of digital signatures and documents.

Developers

A key player in the OpenXAdES project is AS Sertifitseerimiskeskus (SK), responsible for the original idea, main project coordination, quality assurance, web development and PR. SK is one of the main actors in the Estonian ID card project, functioning as CA, providing the certificates to the card and being responsible for all the card's electronic functions. SK handles card delivery to end users, maintains the 24/7 emergency helpdesk for end users, and coordinates the associated software development and knowledge dissemination. SK maintains a number of web sites associated with the ID Card development, including id.ee directed to end users, sk.ee as its corporate website, DigiDoc portal, and OpenXAdES.org that you are currently reading. SK is also the distributor of its custom OCSP Responder that provides for the server end of DigiDoc in Estonia.

SK has created the OpenXAdES project with contribution from its funding, development and quality assurance partners from Estonian public and private sector.

Let us join the efforts !

OpenXAdES software is stable, but it is work in progress (and probably remains so, as most software and standards). If you want to be part of our vision of global digital signatures and paperless document management, you can help the project in a number of ways.

• download and test our work. We want OpenXAdES to be downloaded, tested, scrutinized and used by as many people as possible. Please review the spec, download and compile the sources, try out end user applications and portals, and give us feedback in the mailing lists.
• help us distribute OpenXAdES/DigiDoc to national, regional and commercial ID/PKI projects and CA-s. The final goal of OpenXAdES is to make it possible for people to give legally binding digital signatures. Signature software is just one component of this - other components are availability of secure signing devices to end users, legislative support and other organizational matters. A number of countries are just beginning to implement this infrastructure. We feel that in Estonia, we have confronted and successfully come across many of these obstacles that face countries that undertake such projects. If you are a part of PKI community in your country or you know the people that are, you could have them contact SK to discuss these issues and make it possible to give legally binding digital signatures also in your country, the same way as we already do in Estonia.
• join the CA consortium. If you are a CA and are involved in any regional, national or international digital signature project, whether governmental or commercial, please contact SK to discuss interoperability testing and cooperation issues. As you can understand, the project works as a network and each joining CA adds value to those that are already involved.
• buy the OCSP responder. The OCSP responder distributed by SK is a competitive product. It lets CA-s issue normal OCSP responses, but also issues validity confirmations to digital signatures in OpenXAdES framework. It is competitively priced and can be adapted to work with any CA software. Much of the OCSP responder revenue goes to OpenXAdES project maintenance and development, so by buying it, you ensure that the project will be continuously maintained.

Background

A few words about the motivation behind creating this project. Unlike many other open source and free software projects, OpenXAdES is not just the initiative of a few hobbyists. Although it is certainly based a lot on personal enthusiasm and motivation, the main driver behind this project is the Estonian ID card and digital signature project.

Estonia started issuing its electronic ID cards in January 2002. The card is compulsory to have to all residents, contains two certificates and will eventually be distributed to a large majority of Estonia's 1.5-million population.

Legally binding digital signatures have been the subject of PKI discussions and developments probably already from the start of first PKI developments, but when we, the "Estonian ID people" started looking for readily available options for giving digital signatures in Spring 2002, we found none that would suit the purposes of the Estonian project. Either they were not compliant with Estonian and EU legislation, were closed-source or just too early in development.

So, we decided that the easiest and most cost-effective thing to do would be to create our own implementation. As the XAdES standard was published just in February 2002, we had a fresh advanced standard to work with. So, work started on DigiDoc, which is another name for OpenXAdES implementation and end user applications.

Feel free to read more about the Estonian ID card and digital signature project in the whitepaper.

Contact

If you want to contact the project team, use the project mailing lists or contacts of individual companies.