1.9 The X.400 Standard-based Solution.

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) format defines different types of content types such as text, image, and audio (Chan, et al. 2001).

The current work on the Electronic Data Interchange over the Internet (EDI-INT) data security builds on Secure MIME (S/MIME) formats, public-key cryptography standards (PKCS), and X.509 digital certificates. Given the early work of encapsulating EDI payloads in MIME, S/MIME is well suited for EDI-INT. A mature standard that's widely implemented within security toolkit software, S/MIME adds digital signatures and data encryption to MIME messages. It derives its security features from PKCS encryption algorithms and formats (Meadors 2005).

Using PKCS security technology and S/MIME formatting, EDI-INT can provide digital signatures to ensure that transferred business documents are identical to the originals (content integrity) and to verify the originator's identity (authentication) (Meadors 2005).