Surety’s Digital Notary® Service To Be Incorporated into Belgacom E-Trust Security Solutions
STERLING, VA -- Surety Inc announced today that Belgacom E-Trust, a European digital certificate authority and security solution provider, has signed a reseller agreement to offer Surety\'s Digital Notary® Service. Belgacom will offer the service as part of its security solutions under the brand name Belgacom Trusted Seal Services. Belgacom also plans to use Digital Notary Service to protect its digital data internally as well.
Belgacom Trusted Seal Services, powered by Digital Notary Service, will be incorporated in virtually all of the company\'s security offerings across Belgium and Europe, including secure file transfer, e-mail, web forms and an e-services platform providing complete security solutions to any e-services web-based platform.
\"Digital Notary Service guarantees far into the future that digital data existed in an exact form at an exact moment in time. Belgacom recognizes the critical need for this service, making it an integral part of their data security solutions,\" said Barry Libenson, executive vice president at Surety, Inc. \"Belgacom is part of the vanguard recognizing digital signature technology alone cannot secure digital documents.\"
Beyond Digital Signatures
The American Bar Association Digital Signature Guidelines specifically recommend that any document signed using digital signature technology also be digitally notarized. Belgacom will use Surety\'s Digital Notary Service to fix or \"notarize\" the exact content of a document-and the digital signature used to sign it-at a specific moment in time. This allows anyone to prove many years later that a digital transaction was legally binding regardless of the status of the digital certificate used to sign it. This is necessary because digital signatures rely on certificates that expire or can be compromised, and cannot establish the time an online transaction occurred.
About Digital Notary Service
Digital Notary Service notarizes any digital content by creating a small digital fingerprint of the target data and sending it to Surety, Inc to be registered and timestamped. A unique Digital Notary Record is then sent back to the requesting client for later use in validating the notarization. Individuals, companies and governments using Surety\'s Digital Notary Service can be assured their proprietary data is protected because a digital fingerprint is a one-way identifier-no part of the original data record or file can be reconstructed from its fingerprint. Offering unprecedented and irrefutable record security, Digital Notary Service protects electronic records in legal settings; reliably dates inventions to establish intellectual property rights; guarantees tamperproof records for regulatory compliance; prevents insider fraud, and; validates the authenticity of electronic records created by e-commerce transactions.
About Belgacom
Belgacom SA, headquartered in Brussels, is the national telecommunications operator in Belgium and is active both in its home market and abroad in a wide range of services covering local, international, mobile, and satellite telephony, multimedia and Internet as well as terminals and directories. Belgacom is a public limited company with over 22,000 employees dedicated to satisfy its 5,000,000 customers and a turnover in 1999 of over EUR 4.6 billion.
At the end of 1998, Belgacom\'s Multimedia & Infohighways Division (now Data Networks & Applications) launched a Trusted Third Party / commercial Certification Authority service for E-business under the brand name \"Belgacom E-Trust\".
Belgacom E-Trust is a Digital Certification Service Provider issuing digital certificates as digital guarantees to trust the electronic identity of communicating parties over the Internet. Belgacom E-Trust is as well a security solution provider, offering a variety of Internet security solutions including Belgacom Secure Mail, Belgacom Secure File Transfer, Belgacom Secure Web Forms, Belgacom E-Trust Secure ApplicationWARE and Belgacom E-Trust Generic E-Services. Secure Platform (GESP). For additional information on Belgacom E-Trust services visit http://www.e-trust.be.
Posted: Tuesday, December 19, 2000