The OBELISK Certificate Validation public cloud service offers verification of validity of digital certificates issued by accredited certification authorities across the EU. Lists of trustworthy authorities and revoked certificates are updated daily.
The verification is performed by the web application from any device equipped with an internet browser regardless of the operating system or thanks to quick integration with your information system by a web service.
When certificates need to be verified
Document validity verification
When a recipient of an electronic document wants to check its trustworthiness, all certificates with electronic signatures or time stamps must be reviewed.
Electronic transaction processing
Where electronic data exchange involves confidential information or key operations and their authorisation is based on use of digital certificates.
Electronic document archiving
The archiving process must include verification of trustworthiness of the archived documents in order to assure their validity across their lifecycle.
Use of certificate as authentication element
Where certificates are used for user or system authentication it is necessary to check whether the access to confidential information or information systems is still valid.
Certificate verification principles
The process of certificate verification involves assessment of the following questions:
Was the certificate issued by a trustworthy certification authority?
Is the certificate valid?
Was the certificate revoked?
Standard applications generally offer answers to the first two of these questions. Checks of certificate revocation are not performed by most of the applications and the information recipient needs to perform them manually. Time demands and risk of error during manual searching are considerable. When you use the service of OBELISK Certificate Validation you get answers to all these questions at once without risk and with saved time that would otherwise have to be spent searching for information about certificate revocation.
OBELISK Certificate Validation benefits
Compliance with legislative conditions for electronic document acceptance
Support for assurance of trustworthy electronic data exchange
Timely detection of non-trustworthy content or identity
Unified verification point for the whole EU with guaranteed data update
Easy integration into in-house IS by means of web service
Automatic system support with the help of OCSP protocol