La Poste entrusts Bull to host its digital postmark application

La Poste entrusts Bull to host its digital postmark application.
The French Post Office Group (La Poste) has renewed the outsourcing contract for its digital postmark application for the second year running.

Customer issue

The digital equivalent of the traditional postmark, the digital postmark enables proof of an electronic event to be set up and managed (issuing identity, date and time stamping, data integrity), this proof being legally upholdable to a third party. In essence, the postmark uses specially adapted cryptographic mechanisms to enable basic questions about an electronic event to be answered: WHO initiated the event? WHEN did the event’s author create, see, sign, receive, etc? WHAT is the content of the digital event?

The ‘Digital postmark’, with its signature validation authority and date stamping authority functionality, enables the French Post Office to position itself in France as trusted third party in digital data exchanges.

Bull provided

Developed by Bull, this application is hosted and monitored 24/7 at Bull’s high security production centre. It is based on a replicated architecture distributed across ten Bull NovaScale Universal servers. It was designed in n-tier mode (portal, applications server, database server) and a J2EE environment built around the JOnAS application server developed by the OW2/ObjectWeb consortium, dedicated to Open Source middleware. The application conforms to DPM (Digital Postmark) standards drawn up by the Universal Postal Union (UPU), a United Nations agency responsible for standardizing exchanges between the different postal networks.

Bull’s contribution fulfills the requirements of La Poste:
• Very high service quality
• Capacity to handle a rapid rise in throughput
• Minimal timescales for restoring systems in the event of a major incident.

Web Site http://www.laposte.fr