PKI: It's Not Dead, Just Resting

  • Authors:
  • Peter Gutman

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • Computer
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Like other flexible objects, the public key infrastructure sacrifices someutility in trying to be all things to all people. Mainly, PKI's generic, all-purposeidentity certificates fall short of what the marketplace demands, forcingvendors to develop more economically efficient, useful, and imaginative businessmodels. Thus, we must adapt the PKI design to the real world rather than trying to constrain the real world to match the PKI. A variety of alternative approaches, ranging from simple workarounds to designing the application to sidestep PKI'sshortcomings entirely, can help solve the problems inherent in the standard X.509model.