Certification Service

In the ever changing tech world, the classic combination of a username and password is no longer sufficient. Such typical user credentials need stronger authentication. Hence, Certificate Service Providers have great potential and ITIDA, as a root certificate authority (Root CA), helps those CSPs boost their business through our certificate issuance solutions. We offer a high level of trust between businesses and customers and vice versa.

ITIDA certification services are rendered, by the Digital Signature Sector, using trustworthy systems: hardware, software and procedures. Our systems avail a high-degree resilience against cyberattacks, computer security threats as well as physical security risks.

You can take advantage of our upper echelons of availability, reliability, accuracy of operation and enforcement of security policies.

Here is our certification service’s anatomy:

Issue and revoke digital certificates for licensed certificate service providers and publish them to be available 24/7.

Help to prove or deny the validity of digital certificates of the licensed Certificate Authorities (CAs):More +

Certificate Revocation List (CRL)

CRLs comprise a list of revoked digital certificates by the certificate authorities (CAs).

Certificates can be revoked for several reasons: (1) one of Certificate Service Providers (CSPs) has been terminated or (2) the certificate could have been compromised. Thus, digital certificates on a CRL should no longer be trusted.

ITIDA Root-CA issues and publishes Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) on various web-based locations:
http://rootca.itida.gov.eg/CRL-G1.crl
http://rootca.gov.eg/CRL-G1.crl
CRLs develop a way of confirming the status of digital certificates. We append certificate serial numbers to a list that is signed and maintained by the Root-CA. These lists swell in larger deployments and take time for clients to download when checking revocation.

Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP Service)

The OCSP delivers increased efficiency over CRLs for larger deployments.

The OCSP of Root-CA consumes CRLs to inform whether a certificate was revoked. As an alternative to CRL, the OCSP responder’s signed response to the browser indicates whether the certificate is valid or has been revoked.

Moreover, Root-CA OCSP draws up certificate whitelisting that (1) gives added assurance to end entities and (2) confirms that the CA actually issued the certificate.

Compared to CRL checking, OCSP requests have far less data so are simpler for networks to deal with, as systems do not need to download the latest list of every revoked signature at any moment a certificate is checked.

Root-CA publishes OCSP service via this URL: http://rootca.gov.eg/ocsp-G1

Working as Time Stamping Authority (TSA) More +

ITIDA Time Stamp Service provides independent and irrefutable proof of time for transactions, documents and digital signatures through its Root-CA Time Stamp Authority. Timestamping can create legal weight evidence that
(1) business transactions occurred at a defined moment in time,
(2) e-documents existed at a given time and
(3) they have not been subsequently changed.
Additionally, the TSA can autonomously prove when a digital signature was applied by the signatory. Thereby, its validity can be verified in the longer term, even after expiration or revocation of signer’s digital credentials.

Trusted time stamping is the process of securely keeping track of the creation and modification times of a document. Security, in this context, means “no one - never even the document’s owner – should be able to change it once it has been recorded provided that the timestamper's integrity is never compromised”.

Timestamping service, offered by ITIDA, helps organizations reduce potential liability closely related to time-sensitive transactions by providing a long-term validation and nonrepudiation of the time and date the transaction took place using standards-based implementation, that is easily recognizable and compatible.

Anyone can use ITIDA Time Stamp Service in applications by request the fowling URL: http://www.rootca.gov.eg/tsp provided that request must follow the timestamp standard “RFC3161”

Provides technical expertise in Digital Signature cases in the Egyptian courts.

Responsible for interoperability between other countries providing a point of communication between Egypt and other nations in relations of E-signature.

Audit all the PKI technical requirements of CSPs against the Egyptian executive directives and all the updated international standards.

Offer technical consultations to the ICT community in the field of Information Security, particularly Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

Back up end users’ certificates and data from Certificate Service Providers to maintain the availability of the service in case of failure or bankruptcy of a CSP.