A public key infrastructure is a set of hardware, software, people, policies, and procedures
needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store, and revoke digital certificates.
In cryptography, a PKI is an arrangement that binds public keys with respective user identities
by means of a certificate authority.
The user identity must be unique within each CA domain.
The third-party validation authority can provide this information on behalf of CA.
The binding is established through the registration and issuance process, which, depending on
the assurance level of the binding, may be carried out by software at a CA or under human
supervision.
The PKI role that assures this binding is called the registration authority, which ensures
that the public key is bound to the individual to which it is assigned in a way that ensures
non-repudiation.
Design Public key cryptography is a cryptographic
technique that enables users to securely communicate on an insecure public network, and reliably
verify the identity of a user via digital signatures.
A public key infrastructure is a system for the creation, storage, and distribution of
digital certificates which are used to verify that a particular public key belongs to a
certain entity.
The PKI creates digital certificates which map public keys to entities, securely stores
these certificates in a central repository and revokes them if needed.
A PKI consists of: A certificate authority that both issues and
verifies the digital certificates A registration authority which verifies the
identity of users requesting information from the CA
A central directory—i.e., a secure location in which to store and index keys
A certificate management system A certificate policy
Methods of certification Broadly speaking, there are three approaches
to getting this trust: certificate authorities, web of trust, and simple public key infrastructure.
Certificate authorities The primary role of the CA is to digitally
sign and publish the public key bound to a given user.
This is done using the CA's own private key, so that trust in the user key relies on one's
trust in the validity of the CA's key.
When the CA is a third party separate from the user and the system, then it is called
the Registration Authority, which may or may not be separate from the CA.
The key-user binding is established, depending on the level of assurance the binding has,
by software or under human supervision.
The term trusted third party may also be used for certificate authority.
Moreover, PKI is itself often used as a synonym for a CA implementation.
Temporary certificates and single sign-on This approach involves a server that acts
as an online certificate authority within a single sign-on system.
A single sign-on server will issue digital certificates into the client system, but never
stores them.
Users can execute programs, etc. with the temporary certificate.
It is common to find this solution variety with X.509-based certificates.
Web of trust
An alternative approach to the problem of public authentication of public key information
is the web-of-trust scheme, which uses self-signed certificates and third party attestations
of those certificates.
The singular term "web of trust" does not imply the existence of a single web of trust,
or common point of trust, but rather one of any number of potentially disjoint "webs of
trust".
Examples of implementations of this approach are PGP and GnuPG.
Because PGP and implementations allow the use of e-mail digital signatures for self-publication
of public key information, it is relatively easy to implement one's own web of trust.
One of the benefits of the web of trust, such as in PGP, is that it can interoperate with
a PKI CA fully trusted by all parties in a domain that is willing to guarantee certificates,
as a trusted introducer.
If the "web of trust" is completely trusted then, because of the nature of a web of trust,
trusting one certificate is granting trust to all the certificates in that web.
A PKI is only as valuable as the standards and practices that control the issuance of
certificates and including PGP or a personally instituted web of trust could significantly
degrade the trustability of that enterprise's or domain's implementation of PKI.
The web of trust concept was first put forth by PGP creator Phil Zimmermann in 1992 in
the manual for PGP version 2.0:
As time goes on, you will accumulate keys from other people that you may want to designate
as trusted introducers.
Everyone else will each choose their own trusted introducers.
And everyone will gradually accumulate and distribute with their key a collection of
certifying signatures from other people, with the expectation that anyone receiving it will
trust at least one or two of the signatures.
This will cause the emergence of a decentralized fault-tolerant web of confidence for all public
keys.
Simple public key infrastructure Another alternative, which does not deal with
public authentication of public key information, is the simple public key infrastructure that
grew out of three independent efforts to overcome the complexities of X.509 and PGP's web of
trust.
SPKI does not associate users with persons, since the key is what is trusted, rather than
the person.
SPKI does not use any notion of trust, as the verifier is also the issuer.
This is called an "authorization loop" in SPKI terminology, where authorization is integral
to its design.
History Developments in PKI occurred in the early
1970s at the British intelligence agency GCHQ, where James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and others
made important discoveries related to encryption algorithms and key distribution.
However as developments at GCHQ are highly classified, the results of this work were
kept secret and not publicly acknowledged until the mid-1990s.
The public disclosure of both secure key exchange and asymmetric key algorithms in 1976 by Diffie,
Hellman, Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman changed secure communications entirely.
With the further development of high-speed digital electronic communications, a need
became evident for ways in which users could securely communicate with each other, and
as a further consequence of that, for ways in which users could be sure with whom they
were actually interacting.
Assorted cryptographic protocols were invented and analyzed within which the new cryptographic
primitives could be effectively used.
With the invention of the World Wide Web and its rapid spread, the need for authentication
and secure communication became still more acute.
Commercial reasons alone were sufficient.
Taher Elgamal and others at Netscape developed the SSL protocol; it included key establishment,
server authentication, and so on.
A PKI structure was thus created for Web users/sites wishing secure communications.
Vendors and entrepreneurs saw the possibility of a large market, started companies, and
began to agitate for legal recognition and protection from liability.
An American Bar Association technology project published an extensive analysis of some of
the foreseeable legal aspects of PKI operations, and shortly thereafter, several U.S. states
and other jurisdictions throughout the world began to enact laws and adopt regulations.
Consumer groups raised questions about privacy, access, and liability considerations, which
were more taken into consideration in some jurisdictions than in others.
The enacted laws and regulations differed, there were technical and operational problems
in converting PKI schemes into successful commercial operation, and progress has been
much slower than pioneers had imagined it would be.
By the first few years of the 21st century, the underlying cryptographic engineering was
clearly not easy to deploy correctly.
Operating procedures were not easy to correctly design.
The standards that existed were insufficient.
PKI vendors have found a market, but it is not quite the market envisioned in the mid-1990s,
and it has grown both more slowly and in somewhat different ways than were anticipated.
PKIs have not solved some of the problems they were expected to, and several major vendors
have gone out of business or been acquired by others.
PKI has had the most success in government implementations; the largest PKI implementation
to date is the Defense Information Systems Agency PKI infrastructure for the Common Access
Cards program.
Uses PKIs of one type or another, and from any
of several vendors, have many uses, including providing public keys and bindings to user
identities which are used for: Encryption and/or sender authentication of
e-mail messages Encryption and/or authentication of documents
Authentication of users to applications.
There's experimental usage for digitally signed HTTP authentication in the Enigform and mod_openpgp
projects Bootstrapping secure communication protocols,
such as Internet key exchange and SSL.
In both of these, initial set-up of a secure channel uses asymmetric key—i.e., public
key—methods, whereas actual communication uses faster symmetric key—i.e., secret key—methods.
Mobile signatures are electronic signatures that are created using a mobile device and
rely on signature or certification services in a location independent telecommunication
environment Criticism
See PKI security issues with X.509 See Breach of Comodo CA
See Breach of Diginotar CA References