In 2004 the citizen card will be made available to Austrias citizens. This card will provide every citizen that gets himself a certificate with the ability to use it for digital signatures. A specially designed security layer is responsible for creating and verifying such signatures on the user side. For server applications that will be used e.g. within ministeries providing web.services for their citizens, special requirements hold. We present a concept for server-side modules, that is currently in the final stage of being implemented as a pure-Java-solution.

These modules provide a wide range of security features, including digital signature creation and verification for CMS and XML-Dsig, and automatic certificate validation. They are highly configurability, which makes them applicable in many environments. We have payed special attention to provide a very flexible, but easy to use Interface and to achieve the high performance that is required in such environments. It represents an effective and economic solution for signing and verifying electronic documents of all kinds.

list of topics covered
- the austrian citizen card / security layer concept
- our server-module concept, it's components and their interworking
- key-management and hardware integration
- configurability and measures to allow for high performance
- outlook into the future: integrating ETSI TS 101.903 - XML advanced electronic signatures for long term verifyability the expected audience
Developers, who need to solve similar problems: creating and verifying signed documents on a server.