Enabling trust in e-commerce security

With the rapid increase in Internet traffic, having a consistently reliable way to authenticate visitors accessing your site becomes more critical all the time. D&B enables e-marketplaces to utilize PKI technology to validate and certify trading members.

A client certificate is a digital certificate issued to an individual customer or to an individual employee of a company. The certificate is a specially prepared software file that uses cryptography to confirm a user's identity. The certificate resides in the user's Internet browser or e-mail software and contains the user's public key, basic identification details and a validity period.

Client certificates are designed to offer these benefits:

• Authenticity - Verification that the user is who he claims to be.
• Confidentiality - Ensuring that the data is not revealed or disclosed to unauthorized people.
• Integrity - Protection against data being improperly modified or duplicated.
• Non-repudiation - Preventing a party involved in a transaction from later denying that he or she actually participated in the transaction.

Before D&B issues a client certificate, applicants must undergo a rigorous Authentication & Verification process. Once the certificate is issued, the company's identity is confirmed with the unique D&B D-U-N-S Number embedded inside. This number serves as an identifier to the global database, offering you instant access to updated company information for both registration and transactions when used in conjunction with the Information Broker Software.

PKI
Public Key Infrastructure. A system for encrypting and decrypting messages that relies on a mathematically related public and private key pair. PKI is the method of cryptography used for digital certificates.