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Need to widen e-com authentication

Our Bureau

BANGALORE, May 6

THE Information Technology Act could be over-emphasising public key cryptography as the means of authentication in e-commerce.

The scope of the legislation could be widened to let electronic records be authenticated by the use of asymmetric crypto systems and hash functions or by a system agreed to by the parties to an agreement or any other system prescribed by the Central gove rnment.

According to Mr Pramod Rao, ICICI Ltd, ``only if there is widespread acceptance of public key infrastructure (PKI), will this emphasis be justified''. Other means of authentication could also be considered by the IT Act, said Mr Rao.

He was speaking at Consilience 2001, organised by the National Law School University of India here on Sunday.

The building blocks of trusted e-commerce are cryptography, trusted credentials and end-to-end trust infrastructure according to Mr Atul Saran, Managing director, Safescrypt Ltd. He emphasised the need for e-commerce businesses to look beyond just netwo rk security.

PKI is an end-to-end online infrastructure, said Mr Saran. ``For PKI to be universally adopted, it needs appropriate policies, secure infrastructure, suitable software and hardware, availability of services and risk and liability management,'' said Mr S aran.

He also pointed out that the IT Act was a digital signature legislation. That is, it deals only with digital certificates and digital signatures but not with encryption.

Internet banking -- a potentially large segment of e-commerce -- could see online opening of accounts, electronic funds transfer, electronic cash and the emergence of virtual banks in the future. ``But there are still legal hurdles that need to be addres sed,'' Mr Rao said.

Major areas of concern still remained in online transactions said Mr Rao. Authentication, security, mode of payment, secrecy of customer accounts, grey areas in regard to the revocation ad amendment of instructions, and determining the rights and liabili ties of customers and banks were some issues of concern.