OASIS DSS-X and ETSI digital signature work collaborations

Dear members of the DSS-X TC:

This follows up on earlier discussions of potential cooperation between your committee and ETSI panels on fulfillment of eIDAS and related advanced signature service extensions.

As you know, those advanced services are an urgent public policy goal in multiple governments, which we all hope to see fulfilled with stable open standards. Because OASIS enjoys a positive relationship with ETSI, and a long-standing ETSI-OASIS memorandum of agreement on cooperation, your chairs asked us to explore what kind of joint, parallel or cooperative work may be possible, in order to further develop these services on an efficient timeline. Given the prevalence of DSS and XaDES implementations already existing, and the escalating pervasive use of digital signatures in public administration, it's also important that our communities avoid duplication or re-invention that slows down delivery, forks and confuses the advice provided to implementers, or results in solutions that adhere to a specific vendor or commercial product set.

There is good will between our two secretariats, but thus far in discussions with them, we have been able to identify no clear path towards joint work that would allow experts the more efficient option of working in a single combined project.

OASIS remains supportive of joint work, as we have done before, but other paths to cooperation are available. A few years ago, W3C hosted work to modernize DSig functions for XML use, which was then contributed to ETSI's version of XAdES. It is similarly possible for our OASIS TC to create and contribute work -- under OASIS royalty-free rules -- that then can be reused or profiled by ETSI in its EN-specific programs. If we do not discover greater opportunity to explicitly share development resources with ETSI, then this contribution approach may be the best path to achieve your goals.

OASIS also has continued to support opportunities for DSS re-use and cooperation in other venues, including the European Commission's Multi-Stakeholder Panel (MSP) on ICT Standardisation, which is driven mainly by the views and requirements of EU member state governments.

As always, we appreciate your contributions as expert volunteers to help develop better and more powerful open standards. Please feel free to raise any questions you may have with Chet Ensign or myself, as well as your own TC chairs. We will be happy to help in whatever way is possible.

Kind regards

Jamie Clark

James Bryce Clark, General Counsel
OASIS: Advancing open standards for the information society
https://www.oasis-open.org/staff
www.twitter.com/JamieXML

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