eOriginal selects nCipher's netHSM to secure e-documents

Legislation such as the E-Sign act, UETA and the EU Electronic Signature Directive is driving the need for technology that provides legally enforceable electronic documents as more people conduct paperless business. Sensitive documents exchanged over the Internet such as tax filings, loan applications, insurance documents and contracts, require the assurance that only trusted parties have access to these documents.

Unlike paper documents where it is easy to see if they have been altered, electronic documents are vulnerable to tampering and can bring the evidentiary role of a document into question. The widely accepted method of safe-guarding the authenticity and integrity of the information within electronic documents is through the use of a digital signature.

To ensure electronic documents are not tampered with or altered from the originally intended content, eOriginal delivers application software - to provide financial institutions with the ability to electronically sign, seal, store and transfer documents such as car loans or mortgages - that relies on nCipher's netHSM to secure and protect the cryptographic keys used to digitally sign each electronic document. By protecting the sensitive cryptographic keys within nCipher's netHSM, eOriginal and their customers can be confident that electronic documents are authentic, originate from a trusted source and have not been subsequently abused.

"Our customers expect the utmost in security and reliability when it comes to creating, signing and archiving electronic documents and we have deployed nCipher's HSMs to deliver an additional level of security associated with protecting these documents for some years now" said Bryan Caporlette, CTO at eOriginal. "We have now chosen to migrate to nCipher's recently launched netHSM to increase the scalability of our systems and reduce deployment and support costs, while at the same time maintaining exemplary levels of security. Without trust, complex e-commerce simply cannot occur. nCipher's netHSM provides our customers with the ability to create trusted transactions, including securitizations in the Asset Backed Securities markets, through a sophisticated and scalable certificate storage solution that is cost-effective and easy to deploy."

Using nCipher's network-attached netHSM, eOriginal and their customers can take advantage of a single security resource that spans multiple servers and applications, thereby, increasing shareability and scalability while reducing deployment costs and simplifying cryptographic key management. netHSM manages and protects the cryptographic keys associated with digital signatures and is validated to the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 level 3 -one of the most stringent standards in the IT security industry.

"Cryptography plays an integral role in establishing the authenticity of electronic documents," says Ed Wood, director product management at nCipher. "Protecting and managing the cryptographic keys necessary to individually validate documents is an onerous task with incredible responsibility. We are particularly pleased eOriginal has trusted that responsibility to nCipher's netHSM and that its inherent flexibility enabled eOriginal to satisfy their growing needs."