14. What is Xetex's involvement with Bank of America and Identrus?

As a founding member and major technology contributor to Identrus, Bank of America's goal was to establish the viability of its public key infrastructure by becoming the first financial institution to receive Identrus certification. Having worked successfully with Xetex on a previous PKI pilot project, Bank of America retained Xetex to help design, develop, and integrate its Identrus infrastructure.

Specifically, Bank of America used Xetex to accomplish the following:

• Xetex developed designed and implemented an X500 directory schema, which supports the integration of all PKI components.
• Xetex assisted the directory product vendor in designing, developing, and integrating their directory-based online certificate status protocol (OCSP) responder product. This OCSP responder product can obtain certificate status using the attributes from the directory, without waiting for the publication of a certificate revocation list (CRL).
• To enable certificate management functions to be used remotely by customers, Xetex developed a set of web-based certificate management applications such as issuance status inquiry, certificate suspension, certificate revocation, and CRL reconciliation. Integration with the directory allows these applications to share a consistent view with the OCSP responder and allows the responder to provide online status in real time.
• To enable business customers to register for, obtain, and activate their smart cards remotely and in an automated fashion, Xetex developed an integrated suite of directory-based certificate issuance applications such as customer enrollment, administrative approval, smart card distribution, and smart card activation.
• Xetex developed a Java library for integrating directory applications that was used to develop all of the certificate issuance and management applications described above and to integrate the selected smart card personalization product. The library addresses many of the traditional syntactic and semantic issues related to directory application integration and hides the details of LDAP schema and Secure Sockets from applications programmers, allowing them to work with application level abstractions.
• Xetex supported the deployment of the infrastructure and supported Bank of America and Identrus throughout the Day 3 interoperability and pre-production testing.

By providing a common directory infrastructure and software to support public key issuance, management, and operations, Xetex established a framework that facilitates interoperability and automation of the vendor products chosen by Bank of America. This framework was instrumental in Bank of America becoming the first Identrus certified bank.