Internet Postage Goes Nationwide; Cylink Delivers the Final PKI Release to the United States Postal Service - Company Business and Marketing

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, August 16, 1999

Cylink Corporation (Nasdaq:CYLK), a pioneer of secure electronic commerce and communications since 1983, successfully completed operational testing of the public key infrastructure (PKI) that now enables the U.S. Postal Service's Information Based Indicia Program (IBIP) to deliver postage stamps over the Internet.

PKI technology is a system of digital certificates and certificate and registration authorities that validate each party involved in an Internet transaction.

Based on its extensive experience with public key technology and public key infrastructures, Cylink also plans to introduce its first release of a commercial PKI product offering in September 1999.

The Postal Service uses authentication, security and trust provided by Cylink as the enabling technology for its PC Postage Program. After a year of rigorous beta testing, anyone, anywhere in the U.S. can now buy and print postage using the Internet and a personal computer.

"The public key infrastructure technology created by Cylink is fully installed and running live in our San Mateo operations center," said Postmaster General and Postal Service CEO Bill Henderson. "Cylink's enabling technology has provided the Postal Service with the security platform needed to offer innovative communication solutions to our customers."

"Electronic commerce and communications requires an infrastructure that allows authorized users to access and exchange information with absolute confidence," said William Crowell, President and CEO of Cylink. "Building that infrastructure, which gives companies and organizations the ability to extend secure electronic business services to its partners and customers, begins with public key technology."

Now that Cylink's certificate authority and Indicia verification servers are running and operational, the Postal Service will continue issuing IBIP Postal Security Devices certificates to the participating PC Postage vendors.

The PC Postage products generate a two-dimensional, machine-readable bar code including digital certificates as postage indicia. Besides postage revenue protection, the new system provides a convenience to small office/home office users by allowing them to access postage services from personal computers, and to print "stamps" directly from their printer.

Cylink has been working with the Postal Service for more than three years on the IBIP and other related PKI programs, and will continue to work with the Postal Service on ongoing projects.

Background on IBIP and PKI

The "crypto-agile" PKI solution can support a variety of certificate formats. It is based on standards proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and makes use of the most widely accepted digital certificate technologies. The system was designed to scale to hundreds of millions of digital certificates.

Cylink built the entire security infrastructure and the security components of the system. The multi-processing SPARC-based server system offers full auditing and accountability of transactions as well as a recovery mechanism for transactions that are interrupted. The distributed system can be deployed in geographically dispersed areas around the United States so that if one data center fails, another data center can take over responsibility for the infrastructure.

The IBIP certificate authority is based on the Public Key Information standard (PKIX) proposed by the IETF, which calls for support of X.509 digital certificates. The standard-based system is designed so that other certificate authorities will be able to read and understand each other's certificates.

Cylink Corporation develops, markets and supports a comprehensive family of secure electronic commerce and communications solutions that protect and manage the access, privacy and integrity of information. Founded in 1983, the Company was one of the first to market a security solution protecting an entire communications session by using public key cryptography.

Cylink and its wholly owned subsidiaries serve Fortune 500 companies, multinational financial institutions, and government agencies worldwide. For more information, visit the Company's web site at http://www.cylink.com.