What is the SIRB?

SIRB stands for Secure Information Request Broker. It is an environment as well as an application that combines digital signature, public key encryption and data routing technologies to facilitate secure, reliable, authenticated, approved, authorized and anonymous data exchange over unsecured and unreliable data channels. The fundamental goals of the SIRB architecture are

• To control access to potentially classified and/or personal information based on the needs of the information requester, the data owner and the entity the information is about, according to legal and security considerations.
• To allow the authentication of a person To protect the privacy of persons involved
• To manage third party data access to personal information
• To authorize transactions It is the combining of the previously mentioned technologies that is new.

The SIRB as such is an invention, for which patents have been requested. SwissSign was the owner of the idea but decided to not further pursue the SIRB patent application. The SIRB idea is thus currently part of the public domain.