Membership

Joining the European Bridge-CA is easy and straightforward.
l The basic requirement is a Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI). An own Public-Key Infrastructures, as well as certificates that were issued by public trustcenters, are permitted.
l Furthermore a new member has to present a current Certificate Policy (CP) or a current Certificate Practice Statement (CPS) which shows the standard their PKI works with.
l An application-oriented interoperability test has to check the technically conditions (e.g. S/MIME and X.509 standard) for a smoothly collaboration.
l If all requirements are achieved, the EB-CA board (composed by elected EB-CA members) will have to agree the new membership.
l Finally the joining becomes legal after signing a cooperation treaty inclusive a self-statement. 

Self-Statement

The membership of the European Bridge-CA requires the signing of a contract treaty. Part of this contract is a self-statement in which each participating organization guarantees that it will follow the minimum requirements defined by the European Bridge-CA and in which it confirms its individual responsibility. 
The agreement based on this self-statement is easy, unbureaucratic and results in lower costs.

Interoperability Tests

The membership of the European Bridge-CA requires a successful accomplishment of an interoperability test. The European Bridge-CA defines interoperability on an application level.
For the interoperability on a certificate- and revocation list- level, the European Bridge-CA refers to the substantial experiences of Common PKI (formerly ISIS-MTT) and the testbed published there.

In order to avoid time-consuming "everybody against each other" tests, two test references are announced regularly. New members then test their applications against these test references. At the end of the test, the European Bridge-CA and the new member receive a detailled protocol from the test references. If there are still problems concerning the interoperability, they can be solved with help of the Technology Working Group.

Membership Fee

The fee regulations are available under the following link:
Fee Regulations European Bridge-CA