DALLAS, December 19 /PRNewswire/ --

- Kingdom sought trusted vendor for national ID project, e-government rollout to protect 27 million citizens

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's strategic e-government initiative needed a strong security foundation to instill trust in its more citizen-centric environment -- especially as it rolled out its new national ID card initiative. To address this challenge, Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT) standardized on two solutions from Entrust, Inc. (Nasdaq: ENTU) in conjunction with Entrust local partner Moammar Information Systems. MCIT will leverage Entrust Authority PKI and Entrust Entelligence Messaging Server for encryption, digital signatures and authentication capabilities to underpin its national ID project, as well as secure e-mail.

"I am a firm believer in PKI as the best and most secure means of strong authentication, which is essential to ensure the security of e-government and other electronic systems holding important and confidential data," said Dr. Fahad A. Al Hoymany, the Minister's Advisor for IT and Director of E-Government Infrastructure for the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. "I am also delighted to be working with Entrust, a foremost supplier of this type of technology, in building the infrastructure at the heart of Saudi Arabia's continuing move into the information age."

The Entrust solutions form the security foundation for three national projects and more than 150 e-services MCIT has planned through 2010. In the near term, the national ID will serve as a base certificate, which will be used for all e-government initiatives and other official purposes in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for both citizens and businesses. The Saudi Arabian e-government budget also calls for the development of several major infrastructure projects, including a G2G portal and data center.

"For secure national ID cards, MCIT understood it needed both digital certificates to evidence authenticity, as well as encryption to protect the information stored on the cards," said Entrust Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Bill Conner. "This layered security approach will help serve the needs of their citizens, while concurrently providing secure channels of communication and collaboration in a seamless, non-intrusive manner."

Using Entrust Authority Security Manager, the MCIT root certification authority (CA) also will supply a root CA to the Defence Information Infrastructure to create a single efficient information infrastructure.

Entrust Authority Security Manager, a world-leading PKI, is designed to manage the digital keys and certificates that make up the digital identities used to transparently automate security-related processes in an organization. As an organization's certification authority system, the platform can help enable the use of digital signature, digital receipt, encryption and permissions management services across a wide variety of applications and solutions.

Entrust Entelligence Messaging Server 9.0 provides secure e-mail capabilities for sending encrypted e-mail communication both inside and outside the organizations.

About Entrust

Entrust (Nasdaq: ENTU) secures digital identities and information for consumers, enterprises and governments in 1,650 organizations spanning 60 countries. Leveraging a layered security approach to address growing risks, Entrust solutions help secure the most common digital identity and information protection pain points in an organization. These include SSL, authentication, fraud detection, shared data protection and e-mail security. For information, call +1-888-690-2424, e-mail entrust@entrust.com or visit http://www.entrust.com.

Entrust is a registered trademark of Entrust, Inc. in the United States and certain other countries. In Canada, Entrust is a registered trademark of Entrust Limited. All Entrust product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of Entrust, Inc. or Entrust Limited. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Web site: http://www.entrust.com

Brooke Hamilton, Media Relations of Entrust, Inc., +1-972-713-5915, brooke.hamilton@entrust.com /Photo: NewsCom: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20060720/NYTH074LOGO, AP Archive: http://photoarchive.ap.org, AP Archive: http://photoarchive.ap.org