Society for Electronic Transactions and Security (SETS) is an initiative of the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India. An idea to form a specialized organization, in the area of information security was conceived of by Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and implemented by Dr. R. Chidambaram through the Office of the PSA.where
It was set up for the purpose of nucleating, sensitising and developing provable security designs that can protect the information wealth of the country and that can be used in applications of Information Security products and services.
SETS was registered as a non-profit society under the Societies Act of 1860 in May 2002 and established in the Public-Private Partnership mode. The corpus of SETS was generated through one-time membership fees from Government, Public and Private Sector Corporate, R&D, and academia. The Government of Tamil Nadu provided a 2.9 acre land at M.G.R. Knowledge city, CIT Campus,Taramani, Chennai under a long term lease agreement for the construction of the building.
An Advanced Facility for Information Security and Cryptology (AFISC), has been created for SETS with funding from Government of India, at a cost of Rs.24.5 Crore. The AFISC is targeted to become a Centre of Excellence in the field of Information Security and Cryptology.
Restructuring of SETS was undertaken in 2014 and its MoA was amended with the consent of the then members of the General Body of the Society drawing new members from government and public sector organizations at secretary level – mostly ex-officio.. The Modified MoA, Rules and Regulations and Bye-laws were submitted to the Registrar of Societies at Delhi and got registered in 2015.
