About India PKI Forum
Government of India under its Digital India Vision has taken major initiatives to make the country e-ready by initiating various e-governance implementations across the country like automation of Income tax, passport, Company Law, e-procurement and bidding etc, PKI forms the backbone for all these initiatives.
India PKI Forum (IPKI) is a non-profit organization aimed at bringing technology and service providers, integrators and end-users together to accelerate the adoption and use of PKI applications, digital certificates and other digital transformation solutions, as well as to facilitate interoperability through multi-vendor testing of industry standards and educational outreach. Established in June 2009 and sponsored by CCA, India PKI Forum (IPKI) serves as an Indian information resource for PKI and advocates cooperation and market awareness enabling organizations to understand and exploit the value of PKI in applications relevant to their businesses. India PKI Forum is also an active member of the Asia PKI Consortium which is a non-government organization.
Ever since the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) made it mandatory in 2009 for banks to offer two factor authentication for Internet banking, both public and private sector banks have been on their toes to deploy this additional authentication factor for online transactions. To this end, several authentication methods are available such as onetime passwords (OTPs), virtual keyboards, dual passwords using tokens and biometrics, and public key infrastructure (PKI) or digital signatures.
With a vision to achieve complete digitalization, India PKI Forum has chalked out the following primary objectives -
- Take up and provide more insights towards digitalization matter with various organizations such as Banks, insurance companies, brokerages, healthcare providers, and also government departments and organizations.
- Publicizing on usage of Class 1, Class 2 and Class 3 digital signatures. Also bringing in prominence to various new schemes of signatures like Document Signer, Class 1 signature for low-risk areas, etc.
- Appropriate study and recommendation for:
- Issuance of Digital Signatures to be made fully paperless by AADHAR/PAN integration
- Usage of Mobile PKI and eSign to facilitate anywhere signing.
- Taking up with government sector (who have not yet gone digital) to completely go through digital PKI platform, and thereby increasing the number of use cases.
Member of the Asia PKI Forum
India PKI Forum in the principal member of the Asia PKI Consortium which was established in June 2001 and includes 10 economies in Asia. The objectives of the Forum are to promote interoperability among PKIs in countries/areas in the Asia/Oceania Region (hereinafter “the Region”) and to activate e-commerce utilizing the PKIs in the Region. APKIF has launched many fruitful activities since its establishment. It has coordinated cross-border PKI policies and technology, studied the laws and regulations of electronic transactions, and accelerated PKI technology standardization and the interoperability among APKIF members. Meanwhile, the Forum has promoted the development of international PKI interoperability by strengthening the cooperation between Asian countries/areas with PKI Forum in America, EESSI in Europe and the like.