Tumbleweed's validation solutions qualified by PD-Val

The federal body with one of the longest names in the business — the Federal Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Policy Authority’s Path Discovery and Validation (PD-Val) working group has qualified the Tumbleweed Validation Authority (VA) and Desktop Validator (DV) from Redwood City, California-based Tumbleweed Communications (NASDAQ:TMWD), a provider of e-mail security, file transfer security, and identity-validation solutions, for federal government agencies employing enterprise-level, real-time validation of digital certificates. Agencies can now use Tumbleweed VA and DV to implement solutions for enabling interoperability among multiple PKIs in the Federal Bridge-enabled environment.

Solutions such as Tumbleweed VA’s real-time validation capabilities are essential for protecting critical information infrastructures in large-scale distributed computing environments, and for enabling the trusted relationships important for secure and assured communications. The process of establishing a relationship of trust between two entities, or certificate authorities, is called cross-certification. Cross-certification establishes how each entity agrees to trust and rely upon each other’s public key certificates as if they had issued them themselves, thus enabling their respective users to interact securely. The government created the Federal Bridge Certificate Authority (FBCA) to provide an environment in which federal agencies can request and perform cross-certification with other PKIs, thus allowing all entities participating in the FBCA to recognize and trust digital signatures and certificates sent from and between participating organizations. Currently, thirteen PKIs have cross-certified with the FBCA, including the U.S. Department of Defense, seven federal agencies, the State of Illinois, and Wells Fargo.

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