Project Overview

The ICE-CAR project is intended to

foster the development of European security technology for the purpose of securing the growing application of open networks, as for instance the Internet, for administration, e-commerce, intra-organisation communication, health care applications and research;

promote the availability of technically compatible and interconnectable public key infrastructures (PKIs) which are necessary to guarantee the authenticity and validity of public keys in use.

The objective of the project is to provide all the technology components to support the secure use of the Internet for commercial and administrative applications in Europe. The project will improve and deploy the existing security toolsets from the perspective of usability and interoperability.

Users of open networks are increasingly aware of potential security problems and are increasingly delaying possible open network applications due to security fears. Another reason for the slow deployment of security technology is that users are increasingly seeking integrated and multi-purpose solutions. Applications which appear to be closed and isolated today will have communication needs tomorrow. Security elements like digital signatures are very hard, if ever, to pass through application gateways without re-encryption. It is therefore vital that basic security mechanisms, formats and protocols are identical across many applications. This would give applications the potential to communicate with other applications without losing the security elements.

Therefore, for the purpose of verification and demonstration, the ICE-CAR project has selected eight independent applications which will be equipped with compatible security technology in order to fulfil exactly the requirements given above. The common ground of all these applications is the use of public key technology in the same way, but from different technology providers. Interoperability and cross-certification issues are particularly of interest in this project. The ICE-CAR security technology and PKI will be used by other Telematics, ESPRIT and ACTS projects and several national ones.

For a detailed description read the complete ICE-CAR project programme, and visit the Web sites of the members of the project consortium.

ICE-CAR is the successor project to ICE-TEL. For a detailed description read the ICE-TEL final report and visit the ICE-TEL Web site.

ICE-CAR is funded by the TELEMATICS for Research Initiative within the European TELEMATICS APPLICATIONS Programme (Research Sector, 1998-2000 Contracts, Project RE 4006) and is supported by the SCIMITAR project of TERENA.