4. The Project's Purposes
The OpenCA project has been started when PKI's scenario
was lacking either on the applications side and on the
certificates' management one. We thought that
certification technology, although at hand because of
the increasing computational computer power and ever
decreasing costs, was suffering by lack of open sourced
software easing development of digital certificates'
related applications and deployment of users
acquaintance with digital certificates. The OpenCA
Project was, and still it is, a :
The project development has been divided in two main
tasks: studying and refining the security scheme that
guarantees the best model to be used in a CA and
developing software to easily setup and manage the
Certification Authority.
One part of the project was the development of a full
PKI Open-Sourced software. The software is actually
ever growing as new protocols and standards are being
issued by the standardization bodies. The users' and
developers' community has been enlarging and we can now
count on many individuals and organizations directly or
indirectly supporting the project.
Although the software development is one important
aspect of OpenCA, our objectives were not only
technological. We can say that among the project's
objectives there were also the exchange of ideas
between different realities and the setting up of a
working group deploying code and solutions solving
practical certification issues.