The draft cyber laws, which allows for private parties to become certification authorities and for their regulation by a controller under the central government, will be taken up in the winter session of parliament.

Currently, there are no certification authorities based in India. "We are ideally positioned to become a certification authority. C-DAC is very much interested in it ... it also has a lot of revenue earning potential," said executive director R K Arora. The organisation, which is known for its PARAM series of supercomputers, has now started work on cryptography and virtual private network keys with this purpose.The six-month-old project aims to develop a cryptography key indigenously which can be used for validating e-commercetransactions under the new framework of cyber laws. Though the algorithm for the key will be developed in-house, it will adhere to international standards like length and other parameters, for interoperability in different environments, Arora said.

Certification authorities are crucial to the security of transactions over the net. They act as a trusted third party to vouch for the sender's identity by issuing digital certificates which contain relevant subscriber information. The three aspects to any transaction are: sender authenticity, message integrity, and the ability to prove it in court.Currently, sites like icici.com, which offer internet banking, use the services of reputed certification authorities based outside India like Verisign. Although these authorities are not recognised by the Indian government as yet, the cyber laws are expected to specify the conditions under which they can provide services to sites here.

"No licence shall be issued (for certification authority) ... unless the applicantfulfills such requirements with respect to qualification, expertise, manpower, financial resources and other infrastructure facilities, which are necessary to issue Digital Signature Certificates as may be prescribed by the Central Government," according to the draft cyber laws.