VeriSign unveils new online identity verification services

[Klaus Pommerening]

> Trust services vendor VeriSign Inc. today unveiled a new online
> identity- verification service that allows Web customers to
> positively establish their identities with online merchants.

No, no, no! Not "identities" - they establish the complete financial
backgrounds of web customers. Where have all the ingenious ideas
from the cryptologic research gone? Credentials? Pseudonymous
transactions? ...

> The new Consumer Authentication Service (CAS) provides online
> businesses with instant, round-the-clock information taken from
> more than 50 public and private databases to ensure a customer's
> identity, ...
> [...]
> The communication is secured with Secure Sockets Layer encryption
> that is already built into standard Web servers and browsers.
> "We take extraordinary measures not only to be highly secure ...
> but also we take extraordinary care to ensure the privacy of
> this information," Chakravarthy said.

This is completely irrelevant - "We ensure that we don't give
this information to parties that don't pay us."

VeriSign misuses cryptologic terminology for business reasons.
-- 
Klaus Pommerening [http://www.uni-mainz.de/~pommeren/]
Institut fuer Medizinische Biometrie, Epidemiologie und Informatik
Johannes-Gutenberg-Universitaet Mainz

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