Overview

More and more companies are migrating their Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) traffic from proprietary networks to the Internet and adopting EDIINT transport protocols as their preferred method. EDIINT is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) group created to develop protocols for the peer-to-peer transfer of EDI and other business data securely over the Internet.

There are many ways to move data from one computer to another across the Internet these days. Standard protocols such as FTP, HTTP, POP3 and SMTP are hugely popular and widely used, and there are many open source applications that implement them and their secure counterparts.

The OpenAS2 project is a collaborative effort to develop an open source application that implements the EDIINT AS2 proposed standard.

The EDIINT specifications take full advantage of existing standards, including MIME, S/MIME and PGP. There are two varieties of the specifications, esoterically called applicability statements. The first, Applicability Statement 1 (AS1), utilizes SMTP as the transport protocol, and is an IETF standard (RFC3335). The second, AS2, utilizes HTTP and is a proposed IETF standard. The essential difference is that AS2 requires a dedicated Internet connection with a static IP address, whereas AS1 provides store-and-forward capabilities. Increasingly companies are choosing the AS2 variation, hence, our development efforts are focused there.