FEX - The Financial and Energy Exchange Group

There are a number of encryption engines built into the .NET runtime including DES, 3DES, RSA, and Rijndael. Mercari has adopted the Rijndael standard of encryption providing 128 bit encryption in every transaction and communication across Mercari Direct. Although 128 bit is regarded by the industry as 'unbreakable', Mercari Direct can support stronger levels of encryption should there be a need. Rijndael (pronounced rain-dahl) is the algorithm that has been selected by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as the candidate for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). It was selected from a list of five finalists, which were themselves selected from an original list of more than 15 submissions. Mercari supports Rijndael as it provides the most robust level of security available, without compromising speed and efficiency of processing. Rijndael session keys are exchanged using public key cryptography (PKI). A new public/private key is generated weekly to prevent against brute-force decryption techniques. Access to server connection is limited via username/password combination. Login credentials define what applications, functionality and markets the user has access to. The user is not able to save their credentials locally. All client-server communication is encrypted using Rijndael 128bit key encryption.

Secure Server

This environment serves the web service that underpins the local applications [User & Admin]. Mercari runs a dual CPU server load balanced environment. The application is running on Windows 2003 & Windows SQL Server2000.

The Secure Server also manages the connectivity from each dealer’s institution to ensure, where specific port or IP limitations are required, that these rules are enforced on a client to client basis. The Primary Server currently resides in the IPC Data Centre in Sydney and the contingency Server in Harbour MSP data centre in Sydney. These are both carrier grade centres that boast leading Institutions as clients.

Time stamped audit Logs retained for 7 years include:

Client Login