Directory Supports Certificate Scaling

Software Magazine, August, 2000 by John P. Desmond

The Entrust PKI product from Entrust Technologies, Ottawa, Canada, contains within it a directory that stores crucial information about the digital certificates that applications need to access. In order to process transactions involving potentially millions of certificates, the directory must be able to scale and perform well in a distributed system. At the time Entrust was defining its product three years ago, the only software option available was the LiveContent directory from PeerLogic, San Francisco.

"They had by far the best product that met our requirements, says Ian Skerrett, group product manager for Entrust. Customers needed the LiveContent directory so Entrust has an agreement to resell it. This combination of software is enabling Entrust to support customers such as the Bank of Nova Scotia, which authenticates all its customers doing business online with digital certificates supported by the Entrust product. The bank is known as a private certificate authority in this case.

A public certificate authority, such as Entrust.net, issues certificates that validate that a company is an existing business and can be trusted. Any company doing business over the Web must be issued a Web server certificate. For instance, "No one can pretend to be a bank and just collect credit card information," Skerrett says. However, the private certificate is generally used within heavily regulated industries or to support B2B transactions of a high dollar volume. "When you buy a $50 book from amazon.com, the risk is quite low so you might not need a certificate authority," Skerrett says. "But when you get into multibillion dollar B2B transactions, the certificate becomes very important."

A Growing Market

The digital certificate or PKI market is a young but growing one. International Data Corp., Framingham, Mass., credits Entrust with 45% of the PKI marker today, Skerrett says. VeriSign is the acknowledged leader. As the use of certificates increases, the infrastructure supporting them will have to scale as well, which is good news for PeerLogic.

The only competition for LiveContent directory, according to Brendan Glasgow, an account manager with PeerLogic, are the iPlanet Directory Server from Netscape, and DirX from Siemens. According to Glasgow, PeerLogic is the only directory that combines support for LDAP and X.500 directory standards. "We have been able to combine the strengths of both so we have a distributed directory service that spans the globe and provides world-class performance," he says. Because the product has grown up as a general services directory, it can be tailored to support different applications, such as PKI he notes.

According to PeerLogic President and CEO Daniel P. Gregerson, PeerLogic is on a pace to achieve $33 million in revenue this year, up from last year's $18.3 million. The privately held company was founded in 1986. The directory business accounts for some 35% of the company's business, he says.