Of the total, the quantity of personal digital certificates issued should enjoy the fastest growth rate, increasing from 1.2 million in 2006 to 6.3 million in 2011, more than 30% of the gross certificate market. The business scale of the digital certificate market will reach 3.37 billion Yuan and that of the personal digital certificate market scale should reach 560 million by 2011. Meanwhile, in the near term, electronic authentication applications will make major breakthroughs in the following areas.
On-line taxation: along with the rapid development of information technologies and their widespread use in taxation, on-line taxation has become an irreversible trend in the world. The electronic signature plays an important part during taxation informatization and covers various fields of taxation, such as on-line declaration and on-line authentication, etc. Electronic customs declaration: the customs clearance workflow and operation mode can be regulated through electronic authentication.
On-line banks: as seen from the application scope and extent, the domestic on-line banking service adopts the electronic signature technology. The on- line user identification is an important method for ensuring the security of on-line bank transactions. In this respect, password setting is a traditional mode, and current methods, such as dynamic passwords and fingerprint identification, have appeared along with the technical development.
Purchasing by invitation to tender: the electronic authentication technologies are utilized to handle the information across the whole process of tender invitation, such as on-line declaration, invitation to tender, submission of tenders, tender opening, tender evaluation, announcement release, and supervision, etc.
Meanwhile, encryption technologies are used to encrypt and sign the tender documents of suppliers and transmit them on-line. After the decryption time is due, the designated people in charge of decryption would decrypt the tender documents to ensure the documentary confidentiality.
On-line offices: currently, the web-based on-line office has been widely applied to enterprises. But the vast majority of such systems adopt a "user name + password" to authenticate user identify and there may be potential safety hazards on the system information resource distribution and management. The introduction of electronic authentication technologies into the enterprise Web application systems could solve this problem effectively.
The electronic contract based on electronic signature makes the contract signing process a shortcut and the application of electronic contract at cross-region and cross-country services would reduce the cost of contract signing greatly. Wireless network and VPN: for the networks of different branches dispersed over various places with telephone wires, there are financial and structural problems during network maintenance. Therefore, the applications of wireless networks and VPN are becoming the trend. Information security and network security can be guaranteed through identifying user ID by units, individuals and wireless network operators using wireless networks and VPN through electronic authentication. It is forecast that by 2011 the quantity of VPN certificates issued in China will reach 290,000 and the business volume would reach 240 million Yuan.
On the whole, although China's electronic authentication service industry started late, software products mainly depend on foreign manufacturers, the domestic manufacturers are somewhat competitive on system integration. It is forecast that the market scale of electronic authentication software would grow from 710 million Yuan in 2006 to 3.12 billion Yuan in 2011 and the annual rate of growth is above 25%.
