The aim of the ICE-TEL project is to offer solutions to the problem of security on the Internet as used by industrial and academic research. This will be achieved by support for the usage of secured applications where users need to be certified, by providing a large scale public key certification infrastructure in a number of European countries and by providing all the necessary technology components which allow the deployment . In particular, the project will:

• develop and deploy the necessary tools for both the provision of the security infrastructure and the support of users of the infrastructure for a variety of platforms (Unix, PC, Macintosh),
• develop and deploy security toolkits which allow to integrate public key based security services into virtually any application, and which make use of the security infrastructure,
• develop and deploy security enabled user services which immediately allow to use the certification infrastructure without further application integration,
• support the integration of security services into applications, and provide secure testbeds for applications.

Main validation of the applicability and usability of the tools will be in three selected applications as part of the project, and in other TELEMATICS APPLICATIONS-, ACTS- and ESPRIT-projects. The three selected applications are:

1. Secure communication between administrations and electronic request and delivery of documents in the region of Torino, coordinated within the EU-sponsored „Information Society Network”,
2. Secure communication between national Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) and other distributed network support groups,
3. Provision of a security enabled electronic Directory service for a large British research agency.

The project will take it’s basis from existing security developments from earlier EU projects and with background technology from project partners and set up an initial certification infrastructure at the beginning of the project.