What is understood by a trusted services provider?

A trusted services provider is more than a system that centralises security protocols and functionality. One of its fundamental contributions is that it enables the uniform management of the trust domain, that is, the application of security policies in an ecosystem. In turn, it will also practice and apply the agreements required with other ecosystems to achieve the development of trust in a federated form.

The trusted services provider has the following features:

1. The ability to establish a uniform diagnosis of the information's level of trust. Said diagnosis is performed using the security data related to the operation (chains of digital certificates, revocation lists, time-stamps, etc.) taking into account the trust offered by the TTPs (CA, VA, TSA, etc.) that have generated them.
2. Ease of integration and interoperability of electronic signatures and electronic encryption envelopes, encapsulating under a series of uniform services and a common interface (i) all standard formats (PKCS#7/CMS, CAdES, S/MIME, PDF-Signature, XML-DSig, XAdES, XML-Enc and WS-Security) and (ii) the complexity of the processing logic.
3. Delegation of the configuration, maintenance and management of the security parameters in a centralised system based on policies, freeing consumers (users, applications and other web services) from its complexity and maintenance.
4. Offering a centralised log and auditing system, and even a storage system that guarantees the management of cryptographic material over long periods of time.