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The World of PKI Standards Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) facilitates security services across a global community of users and across various applications. As such, standards are a key requirement for the success of PKI. This blog covers: What’s in a Standard, X.509 – The Base Standard for PKI, Establishing Trust Among User Communities, The Internet PKI, and Passports & Smartcards.

As part of Entrust’s ongoing celebration of our 20th Anniversary of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), we’re looking back in a four-part series on the pioneers, processes and events that have shaped this ever-evolving technology.  In the first three parts, we traced the early history of PKI and highlighted some of the challenges and innovations that shaped the technology thus far. Today we look at the future of PKI and the complexities of creating secure policies and practices that extend beyond borders to protect citizens and data worldwide.

The industry is at an inflection point where technology and market conditions have left just one gap, and that is the knowledge, expertise to provide sage guidance, and effectively deploy, manage, and hide the complexity of foundational PKI security required for the brave new world. This gap cannot be filled by just writing code or reading a book - this requires years of practice and experience in the real world.

Twenty years ago, PKI technology was introduced amidst a whirlwind of hype and expectation.

At the IETF 86 meeting in Orlando last week, there was a working group meeting discussing the operations of the Web PKI.

In August, Gartner issued a report titled PKI Is Gearing Up for the Internet of Things. While IOT is an important aspect of what’s addressed in the report and a foundational aspect of digital business (and something we’re really excited about), the focus on IoT in the title somewhat undervalues the breadth of content covered in the report. 

Organizations can deploy and manage their own PKI or use a hosted PKI operated by a managed service provider. In this post, we’ll walk you through the key considerations to be aware of when choosing on-premises versus managed PKI service.

As the system of policies, procedures and roles that provide and regulate digital signatures and public-key encryption, PKI is vital to ensuring proper authentication doesn’t fall in the wrong hands.