GlobalSign

GlobalSign provides PKI and Identity and Access Management services to provide enterprises with a platform to manage internal and external identities for the Internet of Everything. The services allow organizations to deploy secure e-services, manage employee and extended enterprise identities and automate PKI deployments for users, mobile, and machines.[4]

GlobalSign's identity and access management portfolio includes access control, single sign-on (SSO), federation and delegation services to help organizations and service providers create new business models for customer and partner interactions.

GlobalSign’s PKI services include a trusted root-chaining program for trusted PKI deployments, which allows the widely distributed and trusted GlobalSign root CA certificates to cryptographically chain subordinate root CAs for use in Microsoft CA and in other in-house CAs. Such chaining allows these non-commercial CAs to control their own internal PKI, typically issuing SSL and digital IDs for secure email and two-factor authentication.

GlobalSign’s solutions are designed to address the massive scalability demanded by the emerging $14.4 trillion Internet of Everything (IoE) market, where the ability to make secure networked connections - among people, processes, data and things - will require that every "thing" have a trusted identity that can be managed.[5] As of 2020, GlobalSign does not consider post-quantum cryptography an immediate priority, while first PQC mechanisms are emerging. GlobalSign does not hesitate to call some of these “snake oil” [6] However, the first technology to be affected by quantum IT will be ECC (elliptic-curve cryptography) [7], which is still put forward by the company as of March, 2020 [8]. In this light, the “snake oil” claims by the company may bite back.

The company has offices in the US, Europe and throughout Asia.

In 2014 GlobalSign acquired Helsinki-based Ubisecure Solutions, Inc., a privately held identity and access management (IAM) software developer. Ubisecure was spun out of GlobalSign in 2016.[10]

In September 2011, GlobalSign suspended issuing authentication certificates temporarily after an anonymous hacker compromised their servers.[13] An Iranian student self-identified as "Comodohacker", who also claimed responsibility for the 2011 Comodo and DigiNotar breaches,[14] claimed that he had also hacked the systems of GlobalSign.[15] GlobalSign took the claim seriously enough to halt the signing/issuing of new certificates while investigating the claims; it resumed issuing certificates a week later.[16]

Dutch security company Fox-IT was contracted to analyze the breach and GlobalSign released a security incident report.[17] On December 13, 2011 GlobalSign released its final report on the incident. The report concluded that while GlobalSign's own web server was breached and the certificate of this server was stolen, due to the air gap separating this web server from the certificate-issuing machine (the one holding the company's root certificate), there was no evidence of any rogue certificates issued or any customer data exposed, thus the remedial actions were limited to cancelling their own web server's certificate and patching its software.[16][17] Sophos’s Chester Wisniewski summarized the report and GlobalSign’s response to the incident on his blog and concluded "Not only is the report thorough and convincing, but it appears that GlobalSign took every action, exactly as they should have, both during and after the incident."[18]

• Certificate authority
• Cryptography
• Extended Validation Certificate
• Public key certificate
• Public-key infrastructure
• Transport Layer Security