Rethinking Public Key Infrastructures And Digital Certificates

Stefan Brands proposes cryptographic building blocks for the design of digital certificates that preserve privacy without sacrificing security. As paper-based communication and transaction mechanisms are replaced by automated ones, traditional forms of security such as photographs and handwritten signatures are becoming outdated. Most security experts believe that digital certificates offer the best technology for safeguarding electronic communications. They are already widely used for authenticating and encrypting email and software, and eventually will be built into any device or piece of software that must be able to communicate securely. There is a serious problem, however, with this unavoidable trend: unless drastic measures are taken, everyone will be forced to communicate via what will be the most pervasive electronic surveillance tool ever built. There will also be abundant opportunity for misuse of digital certificates by hackers, unscrupulous employees, government agencies, financial institutions, insurance companies, and so on.In this book Stefan Brands proposes cryptographic building blocks for the design of digital certificates that preserve privacy without sacrificing security. Such certificates function in much the same way as cinema tickets or subway tokens: anyone can establish their validity and the data they specify, but no more than that. Furthermore, different actions by the same person cannot be linked. Certificate holders have control over what information is disclosed, and to whom. Subsets of the proposed cryptographic building blocks can be used in combination, allowing a cookbook approach to the design of public key infrastructures. Potential applications include electronic cash, electronic postage, digital rights management, pseudonyms for online chat rooms, health care information storage, electronic voting, and even electronic gambling.

Stefan Brands proposes cryptographic building blocks for the design of digital certificates that preserve privacy without sacrificing security.

The introduction of public key cryptography (PKC) was a critical advance in IT security. In contrast to symmetric key cryptography, it enables confidential communication between entities in open networks, in particular the Internet, without prior contact. Beyond this PKC also enables protection techniques that have no analogue in traditional cryptography, most importantly digital signatures which for example support Internet security by authenticating software downloads and updates. Although PKC does not require the confidential exchange of secret keys, proper management of the private and public keys used in PKC is still of vital importance: the private keys must remain private, and the public keys must be verifiably authentic. So understanding so-called public key infrastructures (PKIs) that manage key pairs is at least as important as studying the ingenious mathematical ideas underlying PKC. In this book the authors explain the most important concepts underlying PKIs and discuss relevant standards, implementations, and applications. The book is structured into chapters on the motivation for PKI, certificates, trust models, private keys, revocation, validity models, certification service providers, certificate policies, certification paths, and practical aspects of PKI. This is a suitable textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in computer science, mathematics, engineering, and related disciplines, complementing introductory courses on cryptography. The authors assume only basic computer science prerequisites, and they include exercises in all chapters and solutions in an appendix. They also include detailed pointers to relevant standards and implementation guidelines, so the book is also appropriate for self-study and reference by industrial and academic researchers and practitioners.

PKI (public-key infrastructure) enables the secure exchange of data over otherwise unsecured media, such as the Internet. PKI is the underlying cryptographic security mechanism for digital certificates and certificate directories, which are used to authenticate a message sender. Because PKI is the standard for authenticating commercial electronic transactions,Understanding PKI, Second Edition, provides network and security architects with the tools they need to grasp each phase of the key/certificate life cycle, including generation, publication, deployment, and recovery.

With the recent Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, public key cryptography, digital signatures, and digital certificates are finally emerging as a ubiquitous part of the Information Technology landscape. Although these technologies have been around for over twenty years, this legislative move will surely boost e-commerce act

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First European Public Key Infrastructure Workshop: Research and Applications, EuroPKI 2004, held on Samos Island, Greece in June 2004. The 25 revised full papers and 5 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 73 submissions. The papers address all current issues in PKI, ranging from theoretical and foundational topics to applications and regulatory issues in various contexts.

This volume features the refereed proceedings from the 4th European Public Key Infrastructure Workshop: Theory and Practice, held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain in June 2007. Twenty-one full papers and eight short papers, contributed by experts in the field, are included. The papers address all current issues in public key infrastructure, ranging from theoretical and foundational topics to applications and regulatory issues.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th European Public Key Infrastructure Workshop: Theory and Practice, EuroPKI 2008, held in Trondheim, Norway, in June 2008. The 15 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. Ranging from theoretical and foundational topics to applications and regulatory issues in various contexts, the papers focus on all research and practice aspects of PKI and show ways how to construct effective, practical, secure and low cost means for assuring authenticity and validity of public keys used in large-scale networked services.