AS4 Message Exchange Protocol – Helping You Secure Data Exchange Regardless of Sector
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The secure exchange of data across borders is a prerequisite, for not only the Digital Single Market, but also any trans-European initiative, such as the development and coordinated operation of pan-European gas transmission.
The European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas (ENTSOG) is a non-profit association responsible for a number of regulatory tasks on behalf of Europe's gas transmission system operators and adopted AS4.
AS4 condenses in a single specification a series of well-known web-services specifications, such as WS-Security and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) with Attachments. AS4 is typically used for the secure and reliable exchange of documents, attachments to these documents and data in general, and can be used in Business-to-Business (B2B), Business-to-Administration (B2A) and Administration-to-administration (A2A) exchange contexts.
Today, the European Commission and Member States promote AS4 through the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eDelivery Building Block. CEF eDelivery helps public administrations to exchange electronic data and documents with other public administrations, businesses and citizens, in an interoperable, secure, reliable and trusted way. Organisations must install an Access Point, or use a Service Provider, to exchange information with the AS4 messaging protocol.
CEF eDelivery offers a service package that helps you comply with European standards and technical specifications. It includes software, services, documentation and tools helping you to test, deploy and operate the building block. CEF eDelivery Conformance Testing service is to verify that an implementation of the CEF eDelivery AS4 Access Point and SMP specifications, a software package either commercial or Open Source, conforms to the relevant CEF eDelivery specifications.
As an early adopter of AS4, there are many similarities between ENTSOG AS4 and eDelivery AS4, meaning any AS4 implementation marketed to ENTSOG members for use with ENTSOG AS4 should successfully pass the tests in the eDelivery AS4 Common Profile. The newer separate module for the ENTSOG AS4 Usage Profile tests some additional features used in ENTSOG AS4, providing even more complete feature conformance.