Advanced Science and
Technology Institue (ASTI)
Implementing Government PKI
Summary
In line with improving and institutionalizing egovernment services, the Philippine government embarked on a mission to PKI enable the whole country with a focus on a few crucial government agencies such as the Bureau of Internal Revenue, PhilHealth and others.
However, before the government agencies can start using PKI in their systems, the country needed to have the necessary infrastructure in place such as a country Root CA which will sign the certificates for all the other agencies under its care. Besides that, the country also needs to have its own government CA; also to be signed by the country’s Root CA.
With the above in mind, ASTI has been tasked to set up Philippines’ PKI in which ASTI working with the ICT Office will implement the country’s Root CA and Government. The setting up of a Root CA requires a lot of work and domain expertise to ensure that the system deployed in very secure and high availability in place.
Client name
Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI), Philippines
Type
Government agency
Headquarter
Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines
Description
Since its establishment on 30 january 1987, ASTI has gained prominence because of its contributions in ICT, Microelectronics and R&D as the country bids for national development and global competitiveness. With the identification of ICT as a tool to help carve the country’s niche in the global scene, ASTI as one of the government’s focal agency for R&D in ICT and Microelectronics, has been mandated to undertake long-term researches to strengthen and modernize the Philippine’s science and technology infrastructure; conduct R&D work in the advanced fields of studies; and complement the overall endeavor in the scientific field with intensive activities in the computer and information technologies.
Business
Challenges
In 2008, ASTI began its research into setting up the Root CA system by looking at different potential CA solutions.
ASTI encountered many technical challenges especially in term of cross platforms support and flexibility offered by other PKI solutions. Nevertheless, ASTI also wish to move forward and to make their Root CA trusted by all the common browsers.
The
Solution
SecureMetric and PrimeKey, proposed a new CA system to ASTI which could address all the technical challenges faced by ASTI while giving ASTI full control on the CA source code. This has given ASTI the flexibility to do any customizations as they see fit and perform their own integrations to other government agencies that needed to use PKI.
In addiction, the proposed CA System already validated and certified by Common Criteria EAL 4+, an international standard on security evaluation. This will eventually facilitate a good platform for ASTI to move forward for their trusted Root intention and possible to simplify their audit process subsequently.
Why SecureMetric and PrimeKey
The combination of good product with strong PKI domain expertise by SecureMetric and PrimeKey together with the commitment of localized support have given us a strong edge against other competitors.
Result
A new CA system was set up for the Philippines government and deployed on time and within budget. The Philippines government is now able to customize their own CA system to fit their country and citizens’ needs and can start preparing to move forward to get their Root to be trusted via the most popular and secure CA system in the world.
