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About EDUCAUSE
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EDUCAUSE & NIH Receive E-Gov "Best of the Best" Pioneer Award
The awards submissions were very impressive, making the selection process quite difficult, according to Alisoun Moore, CIO of Montgomery County, Maryland, and a member of the selection committee. These winning applications are models for effective E-Government, and the scope and capabilities they provide offer an exciting glimpse at the future of Electronic Government. The Pioneer Award will be presented to EDUCAUSE and NIH, and the project will be profiled, at the E-Gov 2002 Exposition, June 26-27, in Washington, DC. The E-Gov Web site is http://www.e-gov.com/ Developed by EDUCAUSE, NIH, and the Federal PKI Steering Committee, the PKI Interoperability Project establishes a common set of security standards between the Federal Bridge Certification Authority (FBCA) and the Higher Education Bridge Certification Authority (HEBCA) to allow documents to move securely between institutions and government agencies. The project holds promise for a myriad of secure transactions between educational and governmental entities. Last January, EDUCAUSE and NIH hosted a proof of concept demonstration of the linkage between the two bridges, with several higher education institutions successfully sending electronic grant forms signed with institutional digital signatures to the NIH. The demonstration contrasted the pile of paper that used to be required for a grant application with the real-time transmittal of an electronic form carrying two digital signatures identifying the researcher and the institutional official. The digital signatures not only definitively identified the signers, they also ensured that the same form was signed by both parties and that the form had not been changed during transmission. During the demonstration, electronic grant applications signed by researchers and administrators of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Dartmouth College were received by NIH. Even though these three institutions issue different kinds of digital certificates to their faculty, staffs, and students, each digital signature accompanying a grant application was verified and validated in real time, thus assuring the authenticity of the submission. Other academic institutions participating in the project are the University of California Office of the President, the University of Texas - Houston Health Science Center, and Georgetown University. Engineering and programming support is provided by Mitretek Systems and Digital Signature Trust (DST). The Higher Education Bridge uses Certificate Authority products provided by RSA Security, Inc. In order to support this new extension of digital signature technology, EDUCAUSE deployed on the Internet a PKI bridge, the Higher Education Bridge, which allows colleges and universities to recognize and trust each other's digital signatures. The three universities submitting digitally signed electronic grant applications to NIH linked their trust infrastructures to the Higher Education Bridge. NIH linked its test PKI with the Federal Bridge, which performs the same electronic trust-management services for government agencies. Then, working with the Federal PKI Steering Committee, EDUCAUSE linked the Higher Education Bridge to the Federal Bridge, which allowed administrators at NIH to verify and validate the digital signatures affixed About EDUCAUSE
About The National Institutes of Health (NIH)The National Institutes of Health has been working for more than a decade to extend digital technology to government business processes. Sponsored by the Federal PKI initiatives, NIH has pioneered the technologies and solutions necessary to enable digital signing of electronic documents across the Internet. The Interoperability Project's Web site is http://pki.od.nih.gov. |
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EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. The current membership comprises more than 2,200 colleges, universities, and educational organizations, including 250 corporations, with 17,000 active members. Learn more about EDUCAUSE at